What does Section IV.3 of the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation establish as the hierarchy for acceptable remedies in merger proceedings, and what is the priority ordering within the structural remedies tier?
Section IV.3 establishes a two-level preference: structural over behavioural, and standalone-business divestiture as the preferred structural form. The model elaborated this into a three-tier internal ranking, upfront/fix-it-first divestiture, buyer pool with trustee backstop, crown jewel packages, that maps onto common EU and US merger remedy practice but does not appear in the 2025 OECD Recommendation's text. The model substituted a practitioner-familiar remedy taxonomy drawn from other jurisdictions' frameworks for the Recommendation's simpler, less-prescriptive hierarchy, and presented the elaborated ranking as the OECD standard.
The three-tier internal remedy ranking the model produced maps precisely onto EU Merger Regulation remedy practice and US DOJ/FTC remedy convention — frameworks heavily represented in training. The OECD Recommendation's simpler two-level preference appears insufficiently weighted to override the more detailed framework when both are plausibly relevant. This implicates retrieval ranking (primary text vs. adjacent-jurisdiction commentary) and calibration (schema-elaboration confidence when the retrieved content does not support the elaboration).
When Legal teams at Digital Platforms & Marketplaces firms use AI to scope the remedy hierarchy under Section IV.3 of the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, AI tools we tested substituted a fix-it-first / upfront buyer pool / crown jewel ordering, drawn from EU merger-control practice, in place of the Recommendation's actual standalone-business preference within structural remedies. Any internal framework document, deal-team briefing, or merger-readiness playbook built from this AI output encodes a remedy ladder the OECD text does not prescribe, creating a gap between the firm's internal guidance and the standard that OECD member-jurisdiction competition authorities apply.
For a platform firm in active multi-jurisdictional merger review, the cost is operational: mid-review correction of circulated guidance, misalignment between internal documentation and external submissions, and credibility damage within the deal team at a moment when the Legal function's authority needs to be unimpeachable.
Each finding has a stable Citation ID (RLB-F-… for aggregated case-study findings, RLB-H-… for raw per-model hallucinations) — like a DOI, the ID always resolves to the canonical finding even if URLs change.
RegLeg Specialist Panel (2026). "Finding#1, Section IV.3 structural-remedy hierarchy misattributed to EU practice — Digital Platforms × Legal — International / Multilateral." Citation ID: RLB-F-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q002. RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research, published 2026-06-11. https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j1/int/OECD/OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025/sectors/digital_platforms/legal/finding/INT-OECD-INT-001-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-v1-002/
RegLeg Specialist Panel. (2026). Finding#1, Section IV.3 structural-remedy hierarchy misattributed to EU practice [Hallucination finding RLB-F-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q002]. RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research. https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j1/int/OECD/OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025/sectors/digital_platforms/legal/finding/INT-OECD-INT-001-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-v1-002/
RegLeg Specialist Panel, Finding#1, Section IV.3 structural-remedy hierarchy misattributed to EU practice [RLB-F-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q002], RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research (June 11, 2026), https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j1/int/OECD/OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025/sectors/digital_platforms/legal/finding/INT-OECD-INT-001-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-v1-002/.
@misc{reglegbrief_RLB_F_INT_OECD_OECD_MERGER_REVIEW_RECOMMENDATION_2025_Q002,
author = {RegLeg Specialist Panel},
title = {Finding#1, Section IV.3 structural-remedy hierarchy misattributed to EU practice},
year = {2026},
publisher = {RegLegBrief AI Hallucination Research},
note = {Hallucination finding Citation ID: RLB-F-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q002},
url = {https://reglegbrief.com/regulators/j1/int/OECD/OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025/sectors/digital_platforms/legal/finding/INT-OECD-INT-001-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-v1-002/}
}
Every finding on this page compares an AI subject's account of the rule against the regulator's verbatim text from the regulator's own portal. Both are linked. Each delta, its root causes, and impact analysis are documented and published with immutable Citation IDs.