On June 30, 2020, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission replaced the 1984 Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines with the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines (VMG). In the years between these two enforcement policy statements, there has been an avalanche of academic literature that addressed the antitrust law and economics of vertical integration, vertical mergers, and economically equivalent vertical contracts. To one extent or another, this burgeoning literature has informed the 2020 VMG. But have the new VMG gotten it right? This Special Issue will go a long way in answering that question. Some of the contributions offer an assessment of the 2020 VMG, while others contain analyses of economic issues that were prompted by the publication of the VMG.

2020 年 6 月 30 日，司法部和联邦贸易委员会将 1984 年非横向合并指南替换为 2020 年纵向合并指南 (VMG)。在这两次执法政策声明之间的几年里，出现了大量关于反垄断法和纵向整合、纵向合并和经济等效纵向合同经济学的学术文献。在某种程度上，这些新兴的文献已经为 2020 VMG 提供了信息。但是新的 VMG 做对了吗？本期特刊将在很大程度上回答这个问题。一些贡献提供了对 2020 年 VMG 的评估，而另一些则包含对 VMG 发布引发的经济问题的分析。