Law Commons^™

The 2010 Hmgs Ten Years Later: Where Do We Go From Here?, Steven C. Salop, Fiona Scott Morton

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this short article, which is part of a RIO Symposium on the Tenth Anniversary of the 2010 Merger Guidelines, we suggest a number of improvements that should be considered in the next revision of the Guidelines. Our analysis is based on the observation that horizontal merger policy has suffered from under-enforcement. We provide evidence that the enforcement agencies face significant resource constraints which require a triage process that inevitably leads to under-enforcement. In light of merger law placing greater weight on avoiding false negatives and under-deterrence than false positive and over-deterrence, the article suggests a number of ways in …

Vertical Merger Enforcement Actions: 1994–April 2020, Steven C. Salop, Daniel P. Culley

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We have revised our earlier listing of vertical merger enforcement actions by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission since 1994. This revised listing includes 66 vertical matters beginning in 1994 through April 2020. It includes challenges and certain proposed transactions that were abandoned in the face of Agency concerns. This listing can be treated as an Appendix to Steven C. Salop and Daniel P. Culley, Revising the Vertical Merger Guidelines: Policy Issues and an Interim Guide for Practitioners, 4 JOURNAL OF ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT 1 (2016).

Asymmetric Stakes In Antitrust Litigation, Erik Hovenkamp, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Private antitrust litigation often involves a dominant firm being accused of exclusionary conduct by a smaller rival or entrant. Importantly, the firms in such cases generally have asymmetric stakes: the defendant typically has a much larger financial interest on the line. We explore the broad policy implications of this fact using a novel model of litigation with endogenous effort. Asymmetric stakes lead dominant defendants to invest systematically more resources into litigation, causing the plaintiff's success probability to fall below the efficient level--a distortion that carries over to ex ante settlements. We explain that enhanced damages may reduce the problem, but …

Probability, Presumptions And Evidentiary Burdens In Antitrust Analysis: Revitalizing The Rule Of Reason For Exclusionary Conduct, Andrew I. Gavil, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The conservative critique of antitrust law has been highly influential and has facilitated a transformation of antitrust standards of conduct since the 1970s and led to increasingly more permissive standards of conduct. While these changes have taken many forms, all were influenced by the view that competition law was over-deterrent. Critics relied heavily on the assumption that the durability and costs of false positive errors far exceeded those of false negatives.

Many of the assumptions that guided this retrenchment of antitrust rules were mistaken and advances in the law and in economic analysis have rendered them anachronistic, particularly with respect …