Georgetown on the Hill Panel Examines How Antitrust Shapes Innovation and Startups

Posted in News  |  Tagged Antitrust, Entrepreneurship, Georgetown on the Hill, Mergers

The Center for Business and Public Policy at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business hosted a Georgetown on the Hill program in collaboration with Georgetown Entrepreneurship titled “Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Mergers: Can Antitrust Thread the Needle?” to explore how merger policy affects innovation and the startup ecosystem.

The event was moderated by John Mayo, professor of economics, business, and public policy and executive director of the center. The panel featured Ginger Jin, a University of Maryland economist, Marc Ivaldi, an economist from the Toulouse School of Economics, Doug Levin, serial entrepreneur and lecturer at Harvard Business School, and Bobby Franklin, president and CEO of the National Venture Capital Association.

The conversation focused on three main points:

Serial Acquisitions Are Common in Tech

Jin shared new research on serial acquisitions: when the same company buys multiple firms in the same or closely related markets over time. Using a large database of tech sector deals, she and her co-authors find that roughly one-quarter to one-third of tech mergers are part of such a series.

Large public companies, including major tech platforms, account for more than half of these serial deals and tend to do more and slightly longer “runs” of acquisitions than typical firms. Jin stressed that the research does not label these deals as good or bad for competition, but suggests that regulators could use similar data tools to spot patterns earlier, rather than reviewing each deal in isolation.

Limited Evidence of “Killer Acquisitions” So Far

Ivaldi addressed “killer acquisitions,” a term for deals where a powerful company buys a smaller firm mainly to shut down its competing products or projects. While this concern is taken seriously in theory, his recent work finds little clear evidence of this pattern in the digital markets he studied.

Looking at 12 large mergers involving major technology firms that were investigated and approved by the European Commission, he and his co-authors examined whether competitors later saw products disappear, competition weaken, or innovation slow. In these cases, they did not find strong signs of those harms, but he noted that many worries today focus on smaller, below-threshold deals, which are harder to study and remain a key open question.

Why Does M&A Matter for Startups and Innovation?

Levin and Franklin highlighted how mergers and acquisitions (M&A) serve as a critical exit path for startups and their investors. Most new companies will not go public, and many successful outcomes come when a larger firm acquires a smaller one. Those acquisitions can provide the resources, teams, and distribution networks needed to bring new technologies and medicines to market at scale.

From their perspective, a broad “chill” on mergers, especially smaller and medium-sized deals, can make investors more cautious, reduce funding for new ventures, and slow innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence and life sciences.

Across the panel, speakers agreed that antitrust policy increasingly needs to look beyond prices to consider innovation, quality, and long-term competition, and that regulators will need better data, tools, and technical understanding to keep pace with rapidly changing digital markets.

Watch the full discussion on our YouTube channel.