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There is considerable debate about the alternative economic approaches to merger control taken by competition authorities. However, economic analysis is not the only reason for alternative decisions. There has been no previous research on how the legal standard of proof affects merger appraisal. We model decision making as if agents decide according to a standard hypothesis test, with a different significance level being associated with each required standard of proof. We test the model with an experiment run on individual practitioners from 15 competition authorities from across the world.