Law Commons^™

The Size Of Cartel Overcharges: Implications For U.S. And Ec Fining Policies, John M. Connor, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to examine whether the current cartel fine levels of the European Union (EU) and the United States are at the optimal levels. We collected and analyzed the available information concerning the size of the overcharges caused by hard-core pricing fixing, bid rigging, and market allocation agreements. Data sets of United States cartels were assembled and examined. These cartels overcharged an average of 18% to 37%, depending upon the data set and methodology employed in the analysis and whether mean or median figures are used. Separate data sets for European cartels also were analyzed, which …

Concentrated Monopolies (In Hebrew), Michal Gal, Menachem Perlman, Talya Solomon

Michal Gal

No abstract provided.

Monopolies In Competition: The Balance Between Innovativeness And Competition In The Israeli Competition Law (In Hebrew), Michal Gal

Michal Gal

No abstract provided.

Major Events And Policy Issues In Ec Competition Law, 2004-2005 (Part 1), John Ratliff

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr Antitrust Series

This article is designed to offer an overview of the major events and policy issues related to Arts 81, 82 and 86 EC in 2004–2005. The article follows the format of previous years and is divided into three sections: — A general overview of major events (legislation and notices, European Court cases, European Commission decisions, ECN developments and new sector inquiries). — Discussion of current policy issues, including cartel enforcement, private actions and Art.82 EC modernisation. — An outline of certain areas of specific interest, notably competition and the liberal professions, the Commission’s ‘‘Sport and 3G’’ review and a DG …

Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …

Antitrust And Inefficient Joint Ventures: Why Sports Leagues Should Look More Like Mcdonald's And Less Like The United Nations, Stephen F. Ross, Stefan Szymanski

Journal Articles

Antitrust law generally favors joint ventures that allow separate firms to integrate economic functions while continuing to compete as independent entities. In evaluating the risks to competition that joint ventures could pose, insufficient attention has been paid to the risk that joint ventures with market power may be structured so that the parties, acting in their independent self interest, will prevent the venture from providing innovative goods and services responsive to consumer demand. In these cases, it may be better if a single firm provided services rather than having them provided jointly.

We illustrate this problem by challenging the conventional …

Tweaking Antitrust's Business Model , Thom Lambert

Faculty Publications

This essay evaluates Hovenkamp's suggestions, concluding that most are sound, that a few might be slightly revised to enhance their effectiveness or administrability, and that a couple are downright unwise. In particular, the essay criticizes Hovenkamp's call for abandonment of the indirect purchaser rule and his proposed test for identifying exclusionary conduct under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.

The 'Failure To Mitigate' Defense In Antitrust, Thom Lambert

Faculty Publications

The article begins with the premise that any failure to mitigate defense should aim to minimize the sum of three costs: the costs associated with inefficient behavior by defendants, the costs associated with inefficient behavior by plaintiffs, and the administrative costs of claim adjudication. If cost minimization is the goal, then whether a failure to mitigate defense exists, and the content of the antitrust plaintiff’s mitigation requirement, should differ depending on the type of damages the plaintiff is seeking to recover. The bulk of this article discusses how the defense should apply to different damages claims.The article proceeds as follows: …

Weyerhaeuser And The Search For Antitrust's Holy Grail, Thom Lambert

Faculty Publications

A general definition of exclusionary conduct has become a sort of Holy Grail for antitrust scholars. At present, four proposed definitions appear most promising: (1) conduct that could exclude an equally efficient rival; (2) conduct that raises rivals' costs unjustifiably; (3) conduct that, on balance, impairs consumer welfare by creating market power without providing countervailing consumer benefits; and (4) conduct that makes no economic sense but for its exclusionary effect on rivals.

Harold Maier, Comity, And The Foreign Relations Restatement, Andreas F. Lowenfeld

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Hal Maier's career and mine have interacted in several respects. We have both served in the Legal Adviser's Office of the State Department; we have both taught Conflict of Laws as well as International Law; and we have both tried to show--I believe successfully--that there is no sharp divide between "Public International Law" and "Private International Law." In particular, we have both been interested in the reach and limits of economic regulation across international frontiers, initially in connection with antitrust and securities regulation, but also in connection with economic sanctions, pollution controls, and other interactions of governmental and private activity. …

The Demise Of Regulation In Ocean Shipping, Chris Sagers

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Over its 140 year history, ocean liner shipping has almost always enjoyed an antitrust exemption permitting price-fixing cartels of ocean carriers. The exemption was premised on the belief that problems of cost and capacity inherent in the trade can be resolved only by horizontal collusion. Now that that exemption has been whittled away by deregulatory efforts, the pre- and post-deregulation evidence presents one of the world's rare opportunities for natural experiment on the behavior and effectiveness of collusive cartel pricing.

Moreover, because normal and effective competition never really existed prior to 1998, the normative foundation of the antitrust exemption was …

The Demise Of Regulation In Ocean Shipping: A Study In The Evolution Of Competition Policy And The Predictive Power Of Microeconomics, Christopher L. Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Over its 140 year history, ocean liner shipping has almost always enjoyed an antitrust exemption permitting price-fixing cartels of ocean carriers. The exemption was premised on the belief that problems of cost and capacity inherent in the trade can be resolved only by horizontal collusion. Now that that exemption has been whittled away by deregulatory efforts, the pre- and post-deregulation evidence presents one of the world's rare opportunities for natural experiment on the behavior and effectiveness of collusive cartel pricing. Moreover, because normal and effective competition never really existed prior to 1998, the normative foundation of the antitrust exemption was …

Antitrust & Hospital Mergers: Does The Nonprofit Form Affect Competitive Substance?, Thomas L. Greaney

All Faculty Scholarship

Following a string of government losses in cases challenging hospital mergers in federal court, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice issued their report on competition in health care seeking to set the record straight on a number of issues that underlie the judiciary's resolution of these cases. One such issue is the import of nonprofit status for applying antitrust law. This essay describes antitrust's role in addressing the consolidation in the hospital sector and the subtle influence that the social function of the nonprofit hospital has had in merger litigation. Noting that the political and social context …

Competition Policy As A Political Bartain, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Competition policy in the U.S. may be understood as a self-enforcing political bargain emerging from a repeated political interaction between two large and diffuse interest groups, consumers and producers. Absent such a bargain, regulatory policy would fluctuate between pro-producer policies that tolerate the exercise of market power and pro-consumer policies that systematically redistribute surplus from producers to consumers. This perspective is consistent with the broad contours of the historical U.S. experience with antitrust, particularly with the continuity in antitrust enforcement and decline in the political salience of competition policy since the 1940s. The adoption of Chicago school views during the …

Fielding A Team For The Fans: The Societal Consequences And Title Vii Implications Of Race-Considered Roster Construction In Professional Sport, N. Jeremi Duru

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Professional sports organizations' relationships with their players are, like other employer-employee relationships, subject to scrutiny under the antidiscrimination mandates embedded in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Professional sports organizations are, however, unique among employers in many respects. Most notably, unlike other employers, professional sports organizations attract avid supporters who identify deeply with the teams and their players. To the extent an organization racially discriminates, therefore, such discrimination creates the risk that fans will identify with the homogenous or racially disproportionate roster that results. The consequences of such race-based team identification are wide-reaching and potentially tragic. Through …

Do Reverse Payment Settlements Violate The Antitrust Laws, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

The term "reverse payment" has been used as shorthand to characterize a variety of diverse agreements between patent owners and alleged infringers that involve a transfer of consideration from the patent owner to the alleged infringer. Reverse payment settlements are particularly associated with drug patent challenges mounted by generic drug companies under the Hatch-Waxman Act. Many, including the Federal Trade Commission, would characterize these agreements as antitrust violations. However, courts have generally declined to find these agreements in violation of the antitrust laws based solely on the presence of a reverse payment.

This article begins in Section II with an …

Competition Or Monopoly? The Implications Of Complexity Science, Chaos Theory, And Evolutionary Biology For Antitrust Competition Policy, Thomas J. Horton

Thomas J. Horton

No abstract provided.

What Is An Agreement? (In Hebrew), Michal Gal

Michal Gal

No abstract provided.