Paper
This paper is still a working draft and is not yet peer-reviewed.
abstract
Lextract is a Python pipeline that automatically locates, downloads, and extracts relevant market definitions from the European Commission’s merger and antitrust decision PDFs. Relevant market definitions establish the specific scope of competition legislation and identify the specific set of products in an area, making them indispensable for economists, lawyers, and regulators when determining the effects of mergers and evaluating anticompetitive behavior. However, manually retrieving these definitions from the European Commission's verbose decision PDFs is extremely time consuming and error-prone. Hence, this pipeline has been designed for researchers and competition law experts who require a quick and scalable way to extract relevant market definitions from many cases at once. Additionally, considering that market definitions are highly sensitive and, to some extent, arbitrary, Lextract has been designed and implemented to extract definitions as accurately as possible, since a slight change in the language of a definition can drastically change its meaning. This standard of accuracy is accomplished by using strict natural language processing and rule-based pattern recognition to identify market definitions while excluding all irrelevant information. By automating this process, Lextract enables merger and antitrust research at scale and contributes to more efficient competition policy analysis.
full paper
You can view the full paper here.
acknowledgements
Lextract was built by Shriyan Yamali under the advisement of Professor Thibault Schrepel. This research received no funding from any government agency, university, company, or non-profit organization.