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Comcast/Nbcu: The Fcc Provides A Roadmap For Vertical Merger Analysis, Jonathan Baker Jan 2011

Comcast/Nbcu: The Fcc Provides A Roadmap For Vertical Merger Analysis, Jonathan Baker

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The FCC’s analysis of the Comcast-NBCU transaction fills a gap in the contemporary treatment of vertical mergers by providing a roadmap for courts and litigants addressing the possibility of anticompetitive exclusion. The FCC identified the factors any judicial or administrative tribunal would likely consider today in analyzing whether a vertical merger would lead to anticompetitive input or customer foreclosure, and a range of economic methods potentially relevant to applying that template to the facts of a transaction. Notwithstanding the difference between administrative adjudication under a public interest standard and judicial decision-making under the Clayton Act, the legal framework and economic …


Equity, Antitrust, And The Reemergence Of The Patent Unenforceability Remedy, Jorge Contreras Jan 2011

Equity, Antitrust, And The Reemergence Of The Patent Unenforceability Remedy, Jorge Contreras

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The conventional legal analysis of technical standard setting derives primarily from antitrust law. But antitrust remedies, taken alone, may not be broad enough to address recent abuses of the standardization process. The principal example of this shortcoming is the well-known case of Rambus, Inc., which, over the course of several years, was alleged to have concealed relevant patent applications from a standards organization in which it participated and then successfully sued the entire DRAM industry for royalties after the standard was “locked-in.” Remarkably, Rambus prevailed in its litigation campaign despite aggressive enforcement efforts by the Federal Trade Commission. Rambus’s success …


Merger Simulation In An Administrative Context, Jonathan Baker Jan 2011

Merger Simulation In An Administrative Context, Jonathan Baker

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This article addresses the application of the economic literature on merger simulation to the practical context of antitrust enforcement. It highlights the value of simple simulations as a basis for creating screens and presumptions – particularly the gross upward pricing pressure index for the preliminary review of unilateral effects among sellers of branded consumer products and a presumption based on identifying mavericks for the analysis of coordinated effects – in order to provide guidance to merging firms and judges, who may not have specialized competition policy expertise. The article explains why antitrust agencies should rely on these approaches to identify …


Preserving A Political Bargain: The Political Economy Of The Non-Interventionist Challenge To Monopolization Enforcement, Jonathan Baker Jan 2010

Preserving A Political Bargain: The Political Economy Of The Non-Interventionist Challenge To Monopolization Enforcement, Jonathan Baker

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The antitrust rules governing exclusionary conduct by dominant firms are among the most controversial in U.S. competition policy. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, they were debated in three arenas, involving legal policy, economic policy, and politics. In each arena, the dispute mainly arose as criticism of traditional standards by advocates of less intervention. Viewed through a political economy lens, the controversy can be understood as a potential challenge to an informal political bargain reached during the 1940s by which competition was adopted as national economic policy in preference to regulation or laissez-faire. From this perspective, and applying …


International Disparities Panel, Sean Flynn Jan 2010

International Disparities Panel, Sean Flynn

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No abstract provided.


'Dynamic Competition' Does Not Excuse Monopolization, Jonathan Baker Oct 2008

'Dynamic Competition' Does Not Excuse Monopolization, Jonathan Baker

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This comment on a forthcoming article by Keith Hylton and David Evans explains why considerations of "dynamic competition" do not argue against antitrust enforcement. While the prospect of achieving monopoly may foster innovation, that observation misleads as to appropriate antitrust policy unless qualified by the observation that the push of competition generally spurs innovation more than the pull of monopoly. Moreover, the longstanding doctrinal rule that mere monopoly pricing is not illegal should not be read as demonstrating that antitrust law values monopolies for their role in promoting innovation.


Paper Trail: Working Papers And Recent Scholarship, Jonathan Baker Jun 2008

Paper Trail: Working Papers And Recent Scholarship, Jonathan Baker

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Editor’s Note: In this edition we review two papers by leading government economists, past, present, and perhaps future. The first paper, by Dennis Carlton and Ken Heyer, takes a cautious policy approach to single-firm conduct based on theory, empirical evidence, and “considerations of administrability and consistency with general and widely held presumptions” and sets out four “underlying principles” that should govern policy toward single-firm conduct. The second paper, on the role of market concentration in modern economic analysis of horizontal mergers, is by Jonathan Baker, in which he explains how market concentration can sensibly be used for merger analysis. Send …


Merger To Monopoly To Serve A Single Buyer: Comment, Jonathan Baker Jan 2008

Merger To Monopoly To Serve A Single Buyer: Comment, Jonathan Baker

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No abstract provided.


Beyond Schumpeter Vs. Arrow: How Antitrust Fosters Innovation, Jonathan Baker Jan 2007

Beyond Schumpeter Vs. Arrow: How Antitrust Fosters Innovation, Jonathan Baker

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The relationship between competition and innovation is the subject of a familiar controversy in economics, between the Schumpeterian view that monopolies favor innovation and the opposite view, often associated with Kenneth Arrow, that competition favors innovation. Taking their cue from this debate, some commentators reserve judgment as to whether antitrust enforcement is good for innovation. Such misgivings are unnecessary. The modern economic learning about the connection between competition and innovation helps clarify the types of firm conduct and industry settings where antitrust interventions are most likely to foster innovation. Measured against this standard, contemporary competition policy holds up well. Today's …


Market Definition: An Analytical Overview, Jonathan Baker Jan 2007

Market Definition: An Analytical Overview, Jonathan Baker

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This essay surveys important issues in antitrust market definition. It identifies settings in which market definition is useful, and evaluates methods of defining markets. It considers whether markets should be defined with respect to demand substitution only or whether supply substitution also should count. It addresses practical issues in defining markets, including the probative value of various types of evidence, how much buyer substitution is too much, application of the market definition algorithm of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, the Cellophane fallacy, and the advantages and disadvantages of defining submarkets. It also evaluates several controversial approaches to market definition, including price …


Economic Evidence In Antitrust: Defining Markets And Measuring Market Power In Paolo Buccirossi, Jonathan Baker, Timothy Bresnahan Sep 2006

Economic Evidence In Antitrust: Defining Markets And Measuring Market Power In Paolo Buccirossi, Jonathan Baker, Timothy Bresnahan

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper addresses an important aspect of the interdisciplinary collaboration between law and economics: the use antitrust courts can and should make of empirical industrial organization economics, in light of the expansion of empirical knowledge generated during the last few decades. First we show how courts can apply what economists have learned about identification of alternative theories of industry structure and firm strategy to the problems of defining markets and determining whether market power has been exercised. We emphasize that the same analytic issues arise regardless of whether the evidence on these concepts is quantitative or qualitative. Second we show …


Fielding A Team For The Fans: The Societal Consequences And Title Vii Implications Of Race-Considered Roster Construction In Professional Sport, N. Jeremi Duru Jan 2006

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 …


Competition Policy As A Political Bartain, Jonathan Baker Jan 2006

Competition Policy As A Political Bartain, Jonathan Baker

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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 …


My Summer Vacation At The European Commission, Jonathan Baker Sep 2005

My Summer Vacation At The European Commission, Jonathan Baker

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Among the more than 100 jurisdictions with active competition policy regimes today, the United States has the distinction of starting first, creating the most extensive set of judicial precedents, and possessing the largest and most experienced enforcement institutions. Antitrust institutions in the United States have long stood at the summit on any scale of international prestige and influence in the competition policy field. Yet any such ranking would also undoubtedly indicate that during the last decade or so, the antitrust institutions of the European Union have grown in size and sophistication to the point where they are comparably respected and …


Keep Your Hands Off My (Dead) Body: A Critique Of The Ways In Which The State Disrupts The Personhood Interests Of The Deceased And His Or Her Kin In Disposing Of The Dead And Assigning Identity In Death, Mary Clark Jan 2005

Keep Your Hands Off My (Dead) Body: A Critique Of The Ways In Which The State Disrupts The Personhood Interests Of The Deceased And His Or Her Kin In Disposing Of The Dead And Assigning Identity In Death, Mary Clark

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Dispelling Myths: A Real World Perspective On Trinko, Sean Flynn Jan 2005

Dispelling Myths: A Real World Perspective On Trinko, Sean Flynn

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Two Modern Antitrust Moments: A Comment On Fenton And Kwoka, Jonathan Baker Jan 2005

Two Modern Antitrust Moments: A Comment On Fenton And Kwoka, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Introduction To Symposium On Integrating New Economic Learning With Antitrust Doctrine, Jonathan Baker Jan 2004

Introduction To Symposium On Integrating New Economic Learning With Antitrust Doctrine, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Why Did The Antitrust Agencies Embrace Unilateral Effects, Jonathan Baker Jan 2003

Why Did The Antitrust Agencies Embrace Unilateral Effects, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Competitive Price Discrimination: The Exercise Of Market Power Without Anticompetitive Effects (Comment On Klein And Wiley), Jonathan Baker Jan 2003

Competitive Price Discrimination: The Exercise Of Market Power Without Anticompetitive Effects (Comment On Klein And Wiley), Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

A firm that discriminates in prices faces a downward sloping demand curve, and thus could potentially raise price by reducing output. For this reason, evidence of price discrimination is relevant to assessing the possibility of market power, as antitrust law has long recognized. But price discrimination can be beneficial as well as harmful, and can reasonably be termed competitive if entry is easy. Hence a demonstration that entry is easy rebuts the inference of anticompetitive effect when price discrimination is the basis for proof of market power, breaking the link between market power and anticompetitive effect. Klein and Wiley's proposal …


Mavericks, Mergers, And Exclusion: Proving Coordinated Competitive Effects Under The Antitrust Laws, Jonathan Baker Jan 2002

Mavericks, Mergers, And Exclusion: Proving Coordinated Competitive Effects Under The Antitrust Laws, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Symposium: Antitrust At The Millennium (Part Ii), Jonathan Baker Jan 2001

Symposium: Antitrust At The Millennium (Part Ii), Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This issue features Part II of the Antitrust Law Journal's Symposium on Antitrust at the Millennium. As with Part I, which appeared in Volume 68, Issue 1 (2000), most Symposium authors use a decision or other significant text from antitrust's past as a springboard to discuss some aspect of antitrust's future. This group of Symposium essays is being published in the wake of a U.S. election that has shifted control of the Executive Branch of the federal government from Democrats to Republicans. Yet the broad themes and challenges pursed by Symposium authors are likely to remain central to antitrust regardless …


New Horizons In Cartel Detection, Jonathan Baker Jan 2001

New Horizons In Cartel Detection, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Should Concentration Be Dropped From The Merger Guidelines?, Jonathan Baker, Steven Salop Jan 2001

Should Concentration Be Dropped From The Merger Guidelines?, Jonathan Baker, Steven Salop

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As members of the ABA Antitrust Section's Task Force on Fundamental Theory, we are pleased to provide a briefdiscussion of the appropriate role of market concentration in the review of mergers under the antitrust laws. Thispaper, organized in four main parts, will offer some suggestions for revising the Department of Justice and FederalTrade Commission Horizontal Merger Guidelines. A final section of this work will analyze whether it would bepreferable to conduct merger analysis by applying Professor Michael E. Porter's business strategy framework ratherthan the Merger Guidelines.


Stepping Out In An Old Brown Shoe: In Qualified Praise Of Submarkets, Jonathan Baker Jan 2000

Stepping Out In An Old Brown Shoe: In Qualified Praise Of Submarkets, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Symposium: Antitrust At The Millennium (Part I), Jonathan Baker Jan 2000

Symposium: Antitrust At The Millennium (Part I), Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

To commemorate the new millennium, the Antitrust Law Journal commissioned essays from a diverse group of antitrust specialists-legal academics, practitioners, and economists. The authors were asked to take a decision or other significant text from antitrust's past and use it as a springboard to discuss some important aspect of antitrust's future. The results of this unique publishing project will be printed in two parts, the first half in Volume 68, Issue 1 (this issue) and the second half in Volume 68, Issue 3 (later this year).


Promoting Innovation Competition Through The Aspen/Kodak Rule, Jonathan Baker Jan 1999

Promoting Innovation Competition Through The Aspen/Kodak Rule, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.


Empirical Methods In Antitrust Litigation: Review And Critique, Jonathan Baker, Daniel Rubinfeld Jan 1999

Empirical Methods In Antitrust Litigation: Review And Critique, Jonathan Baker, Daniel Rubinfeld

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The use of empirical methods in antitrust has been growing at an exponential rate. It is now commonplace for multiple regression and other statistical methods to be utilized in merger cases, especially those involving predictions of the price increases that may result from the strategic decisions of the merging firms. These methods are also prominently employed in civil nonmerger investigations by the federal antitrust enforcement agencies (including price fixing, monopolization, and exclusive dealing cases) and in private litigation (including damage claims and class action suits). This article surveys the methodologies that have been used and the range of questions that …


Econometric Analysis In Ftc V. Staples, Jonathan Baker Jan 1999

Econometric Analysis In Ftc V. Staples, Jonathan Baker

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In mid-1997, a federal district court in Washington, DC, granted the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) request for a preliminary injunction blocking the proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot (Federal Trade Commission v. Staples, Inc. [hereafter, Staples] 1997a). The transaction would have combined two of the nation's three leading office superstore chains. The firms chose not to pursue the case further after the preliminary injunction was issued, thus giving up on their efforts to merge.


Policy Watch: Developments In Antitrust Economics, Jonathan Baker Jan 1999

Policy Watch: Developments In Antitrust Economics, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the federal courts transformed antitrust rules and the federal enforcement agencies altered their case selection criteria in response to theories developed by industrial organization economists. These developments in economic thinking, often associated with the Chicago school, led current antitrust law and practice toward a greater skepticism about the relationship between market concentration and market power and a greater recognition of the possible efficiency-enhancing role of vertical agreements (contracts between firms and their customers or suppliers) than was present in the 1950s and 1960s.This survey will begin where those developments leave off by highlighting more …