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The bias that these kinds of analysis always have is: We'll never truly know what the world would have looked like if the merger wasn't allowed to happen. Like,
by 827a 1y ago
The bias that these kinds of analysis always have is: We'll never truly know what the world would have looked like if the merger wasn't allowed to happen. Like, it's easy and correct to say "the ABK acquisition resulted in bad outcomes for gamers, employees at ABK, and Microsoft itself" (in fact, the only winners were probably ABK investors). But it's impossible to say "these outcomes are worse than those that would have happened had ABK been left alone", because we cannot know.
- thrance 1y agoOne could also use your reasoning to claim that no statements can ever be made about the impact of economic policies, because once they're in place, we can't compare with a world where they wouldn't have been adopted. Best we can do is keep a set of statistics and try to correct for multivariate bias. Doesn't mean we're navigating all of this completely blind.