(UK) The Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission will merge soon. OFT was doing antitrust investigations and therefore had an overlapping mandate with the Competition Commission, but was also responsible for consumer protection, a function that will probably disappear in the merged entity. One argument for the merger is to speed up antitrust reviews and decrease cost: an efficiency argument that certainly sounds familiar for merger cases. Some feel that the decrease in costs is unlikely (see the FT article OFT merger.pdf), but having one rather two hurdles should indeed speed up antitrust reviews. One potential risk to consumers is the loss of a direct advocate (OFT) with a relatively broad mandate, risk that is dismissed by officials but should perhaps be considered seriously if the new entity will outsource the consumer functions of the OFT (the literature on organizations and contracts has indeed highlighted the efficiency role of competing agencies; see for instance "Advocates" by Mathias Dewatripont and Jean Tirole, Journal of Political Economy 1999).
