Study after study has found conclusively that mergers and fewer companies result in higher prices in every business. The average price for U.S. cable TV service, paid in most places to a literal monopoly, rose by half just between 2010 and 2018. “The evidence strongly suggests,” the NYU economist and Federal Reserve Bank adviser Thomas Philippon wrote in 2019, “that increasing concentration in the U.S. is responsible for an excessive increase in prices.” He estimates that “this very new era of oligopoly costs each typical American household more than $5,000 a year.”
