Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- Antitrust and Trade Regulation (18)
- Social and Behavioral Sciences (7)
- Law and Economics (6)
- Business (5)
- Economics (5)
-
- Intellectual Property Law (5)
- Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration (5)
- Industrial Organization (4)
- Technology and Innovation (4)
- Business Organizations Law (3)
- Economic Policy (3)
- Legal History (3)
- Public Law and Legal Theory (3)
- Science and Technology Law (3)
- Administrative Law (2)
- Economic Theory (2)
- Legal Remedies (2)
- Policy History, Theory, and Methods (2)
- Science and Technology Studies (2)
- Securities Law (2)
- Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (1)
- Arts and Humanities (1)
- Business Administration, Management, and Operations (1)
- Communication (1)
- Communication Technology and New Media (1)
- Comparative and Foreign Law (1)
- Computer Sciences (1)
- Corporate Finance (1)
- Courts (1)
- Institution
Articles 1 - 24 of 24
Full-Text Articles in Law
Regulating New Tech: Problems, Pathways, And People, Cary Coglianese
Regulating New Tech: Problems, Pathways, And People, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
New technologies bring with them many promises, but also a series of new problems. Even though these problems are new, they are not unlike the types of problems that regulators have long addressed in other contexts. The lessons from regulation in the past can thus guide regulatory efforts today. Regulators must focus on understanding the problems they seek to address and the causal pathways that lead to these problems. Then they must undertake efforts to shape the behavior of those in industry so that private sector managers focus on their technologies’ problems and take actions to interrupt the causal pathways. …
Antitrust And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Are large digital platforms that deal directly with consumers “winner take all,” or natural monopoly, firms? That question is surprisingly complex and does not produce the same answer for every platform. The closer one looks at digital platforms the less they seem to be winner-take-all. As a result, competition can be made to work in most of them. Further, antitrust enforcement, with its accommodation of firm variety, is generally superior to any form of statutory regulation that generalizes over large numbers.
Assuming that an antitrust violation is found, what should be the remedy? Breaking up large firms subject to extensive …
Addressing The Divisions In Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Addressing The Divisions In Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
This is the text of an interview conducted in writing by Professor A. Douglas Melamed, Stanford Law School.
Trademark, Labor Law, And Antitrust, Oh My!, Jessica Silbey
Trademark, Labor Law, And Antitrust, Oh My!, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
I am allergic to antitrust law, but after reading Hiba Hafiz’s recent article, I understand that my aversion is problematic. This paper combines an analysis of trademark law, labor law, and antitrust law to explain how employers exploit trademark law protections and defenses to control labor markets and underpay and under-protect workers. For most IP lawyers and professors, this article will open our minds to some collateral effects of trademark law’s consumer protection rationale on other areas of law with important consequences for economic and social policies.
Voting Trusts And Antitrust: Rethinking The Role Of Shareholder Litigation In Public Regulation, From The 1880s To The 1930s, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Voting Trusts And Antitrust: Rethinking The Role Of Shareholder Litigation In Public Regulation, From The 1880s To The 1930s, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Naomi R. Lamoreaux
Scholarly Works
In 1903 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) bought a majority interest in the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company, allegedly with the aim of eliminating competition in the telephone business. Perhaps it is not remarkable that the Illinois Supreme Court ruled this acquisition of an Illinois corporation to be illegal. What is noteworthy, however, is that the court took this step at the behest of a group of Kellogg’s minority shareholders who had filed suit to block the deal. Judges had long responded skeptically to such actions, worried that shareholders would clog the courts with challenges to managers’ decisions …
Appreciating The Overlooked Contributions Of The New Harvard School, Christopher S. Yoo
Appreciating The Overlooked Contributions Of The New Harvard School, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
My colleague, Herbert Hovenkamp, is almost universally recognized as the most cited and the most authoritative US antitrust scholar. Among his many honors, his status as the senior author of the authoritative Areeda and Hovenkamp treatise makes him the unquestioned leader of the New Harvard School, which has long served as the bellwether for how courts are likely to resolve emerging issues in modern antitrust doctrine. Unfortunately, its defining tenets and its positions on emerging issues remain surprisingly obscure. My contribution to this festschrift explores the core commitments that distinguish the New Harvard School from other approaches to antitrust. It …
Antitrust Harm And Causation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust Harm And Causation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
How should plaintiffs show harm from antitrust violations? The inquiry naturally breaks into two issues: first, what is the nature of the harm? and second, what does proof of causation require? The best criterion for assessing harm is likely or reasonably anticipated output effects. Antitrust’s goal should be output as high as is consistent with sustainable competition.
The standard for proof of causation then depends on two things: the identity of the enforcer and the remedy that the plaintiff is seeking. It does not necessarily depend on which antitrust statute the plaintiff is seeking to enforce. For public agencies, enforcement …
Protecting And Fostering Online Platform Competition: The Role Of Antitrust Law, Jonathan Baker
Protecting And Fostering Online Platform Competition: The Role Of Antitrust Law, Jonathan Baker
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
This essay provides a perspective on the role of antitrust law in protecting and fostering competition in the digital economy, with particular attention to online platforms. It highlights the danger of anticompetitive exclusionary conduct by dominant online platforms and describes ways that antitrust law can challenge and deter such conduct. The essay also identifies a number of difficulties that U.S. courts and enforcers face in challenging harmful exclusionary conduct by dominant platforms, and discusses some ways that regulation can supplement antitrust law in fostering competition.
Patents And Price Fixing By Serial Colluders, Michael J. Meurer, William Kovacic, Robert Marshall
Patents And Price Fixing By Serial Colluders, Michael J. Meurer, William Kovacic, Robert Marshall
Faculty Scholarship
Antitrust law has long been mindful of the danger that firms may misuse their patents to facilitate price fixing. Courts and commentators addressing this danger have assumed that patent-facilitated price fixing occurs in a single market. In this Article, we extend conventional analysis to address firms’ patent misuse to facilitate price fixing across multiple products lines. By doing so, we expose gaps in existing agency enforcement and scholarly proposals for reform. Important legal tests that make sense in the single market setting do not carry over to the context we call serial collusion, where certain offenders engage in repeat collusion …
A Framework For Evaluating Willingness Of Frand Licensees, Jorge L. Contreras
A Framework For Evaluating Willingness Of Frand Licensees, Jorge L. Contreras
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
An increasing number of cases around the world turn on whether a manufacturer of a product – e.g., a smartphone, a tablet or a car -- (an “implementer”) is willing to pay a “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” (FRAND) royalty for patents that are essential to an industry standard embodied in that product (standards-essential patents or SEPs). This determination is important both to the analysis of the appropriateness of an injunction under the 4-factor eBay test in the U.S., and for assessing the appropriateness of injunctive relief under the Huawei v. ZTE competition law case in the EU. This essay explores …
Balance Requirements For Standards Development Organizations: A Historical, Legal And Institutional Assessment, Justus Baron, Jorge L. Contreras, Pierre Larouche
Balance Requirements For Standards Development Organizations: A Historical, Legal And Institutional Assessment, Justus Baron, Jorge L. Contreras, Pierre Larouche
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Most technical standards-development organizations (SDOs) have adopted internal policies embodying “due process” criteria such as openness, balance of interests, consensus decision making and appeals. These requirements arise from numerous sources including antitrust law, international trade law, public procurement requirements and institutional norms. Yet balance criteria lack a generally-accepted definition and the manner in which they are implemented varies, sometimes dramatically, among SDOs. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the principle that SDOs should ensure a balance of interests among their stakeholders, including in the development of intellectual property rights policies. This article explores the origins and meaning of …
Brief Of Amici Curiae 65 Professors Of Law, Business, Economics, And Sports Management In Support Of Respondents, Chris Sagers, Michael A. Carrier, Lisa M. Geary
Brief Of Amici Curiae 65 Professors Of Law, Business, Economics, And Sports Management In Support Of Respondents, Chris Sagers, Michael A. Carrier, Lisa M. Geary
Law Faculty Briefs and Court Documents
The Alston plaintiffs are college athletes who successfully challenged the NCAA's "amateurism" rules, convincing the lower courts that the rules should be modestly relaxed to limit their effect on competition for athletic talent. Nearly 60 professors of law, business, and economics from around the country joined the brief.
Navigating The Transition To A More Innovation-Centric Antitrust (Review Of Richard J. Gilbert, Innovation Matters), Jonathan Baker
Navigating The Transition To A More Innovation-Centric Antitrust (Review Of Richard J. Gilbert, Innovation Matters), Jonathan Baker
Book Reviews
Review of Richard J. Gilbert Innovation Matters: Competition Policy for the High-Technology Economy MIT Press 2020
Hacking Antitrust: Competition Policy And The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act, Charles Duan
Hacking Antitrust: Competition Policy And The Computer Fraud And Abuse Act, Charles Duan
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal computer trespass statute that prohibits accessing a computer "without authorization or exceeding authorized access," has often been criticized for clashing with online norms, over-criminalizing common behavior, and infringing freedom-of-expression interests. These controversies over the CFAA have raised difficult questions about how the statute is to be interpreted, with courts of appeals split on the proper construction and the Supreme Courtset to consider the law in its current October Term 2020.
This article considers the CFAA in a new light, namely its effects on competition. Rather than merely preventing injurious trespass upon computers, …
Peeling Apple: Antitrust Standing & Intermediary Defendants, John E. Lopatka
Peeling Apple: Antitrust Standing & Intermediary Defendants, John E. Lopatka
Journal Articles
When market intermediaries unlawfully acquire market power, vertically related market participants may sue under the antitrust laws to recover damages. Their ability to recover depends upon an intricate set of doctrines that define private standing, including the indirect-purchaser rules set down by the Supreme Court most notably in Illinois Brick. In Apple Inc. v. Pepper, the Court decided the application of the indirect-purchaser rules to a particular kind of intermediary, a platform in a two-sided market. The Article explores private antitrust standing doctrines as they apply to market intermediaries, using Apple to frame the exposition. The Court there held that …
The Political Face Of Antitrust, Spencer Weber Waller
The Political Face Of Antitrust, Spencer Weber Waller
Faculty Publications & Other Works
The last twenty years have brought antitrust back to the fore as a political issue of greater salience. Several booms and busts in the economy have highlighted the issue of corporate power in the economy and the political system. The growing influence and aggressiveness of the European Union and other jurisdictions' competition laws have highlighted the relative retreat in the United States. Political movements in the United States have brought issues of corporate power and its abuse back into the public limelight and with them a greater political salience for antitrust in the election cycle of 2020.
The Political Face Of Antitrust, Spencer Weber Waller, Jacob Morse
The Political Face Of Antitrust, Spencer Weber Waller, Jacob Morse
Faculty Publications & Other Works
The last twenty years have brought antitrust back to the fore as a political issue of greater salience. Several booms and busts in the economy have highlighted the issue of corporate power in the economy and the political system. The growing influence and aggressiveness of the European Union and other jurisdictions' competition laws have highlighted the relative retreat in the United States. Political movements in the United States have brought issues of corporate power and its abuse back into the public limelight and with them a greater political salience for antitrust in the election cycle of 2020.
Antitrust's High-Tech Exceptionalism, Rebecca H. Allensworth
Antitrust's High-Tech Exceptionalism, Rebecca H. Allensworth
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
American competition policy has four big problems: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. These companies each reign over a sector of the digital marketplace, controlling both the consumer experience and the possibility of competitive entry. This Essay argues that the conventional account of how antitrust law allowed this consolidation of market power - that it failed to evolve to address the market realities of the technology sector-is incomplete. Not only did courts fail to adapt antitrust law from its smoke-stack roots, but they gave big tech special dispensation under traditional antitrust doctrine. Swayed by prevailing utopic views about digital markets in …
The Looming Crisis In Antitrust Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Looming Crisis In Antitrust Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
As in so many areas of law and politics in the United States, antitrust’s center is at bay. It is besieged by a right wing that wants to limit antitrust even more than it has been limited over the last quarter century. On the left, it faces revisionists who propose significantly greater enforcement.
One thing the two extremes share, however, is denigration of the role of economics in antitrust analysis. On the right, the Supreme Court’s two most recent antitrust decisions at this writing reveal that economic analysis no longer occupies the central role that it once had. On the …
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Gouging (But Were Afraid To Ask): A Response To Ramsi Woodcock, Brian L. Frye
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Gouging (But Were Afraid To Ask): A Response To Ramsi Woodcock, Brian L. Frye
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
Good scholarship makes you change your mind, but great scholarship
makes you think differently. As usual, Ramsi Woodcock's article "The Efficient
Queue and the Case Against Dynamic Pricing", is great, because it made me
think differently about price regulation. Woodcock observes that prices not
only communicate information, but also redistribute resources. Sometimes,
producers change prices in response to competition or changes in the cost of
production. But other times, they change prices just because they can.
When prices reflect the marginal cost of production, consumers benefit
from market efficiencies. But when prices reflect a surge in demand, they
simply transfer …
Due Process In Antitrust Enforcement: Normative And Comparative Perspectives, Christopher S. Yoo, Yong Huang, Thomas Fetzer, Shan Jiang
Due Process In Antitrust Enforcement: Normative And Comparative Perspectives, Christopher S. Yoo, Yong Huang, Thomas Fetzer, Shan Jiang
All Faculty Scholarship
Due process in antitrust enforcement has significant implications for better professional and accurate enforcement decisions. Not only can due process spur economic growth, raise government credibility, and limit the abuse of powers according to law, it also promotes competitive reforms in monopolized sectors and curbs corruption. Jurisdictions learn from the best practices in the investigation process, decisionmaking process, and the announcement and judicial review of antitrust enforcement decisions. By comparing the enforcement policies of China, the European Union, and the United States, this article calls for better disclosure of evidence, participation of legal counsel, and protection of the procedural and …
Blockchain Neutrality, Samuel N. Weinstein
Blockchain Neutrality, Samuel N. Weinstein
Articles
Blockchain technology is transforming how markets work. Blockchains eliminate the need for trusted gatekeepers like banks to execute, verify, and record transactions. In the financial markets, their disruptive potential threatens both Wall Street banks and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. How blockchain technology is regulated will determine whether it encourages or inhibits competition. Some blockchain applications present serious fraud and systemic risks, complicating regulation. This Article explores the antitrust and competition policy challenges blockchain presents and proposes a regulatory strategy, modeled on Internet regulation and net neutrality principles, to unlock blockchain’s competitive potential. It contends that financial regulators should promote blockchain …
Common Ownership: Do Managers Really Compete Less?, Merritt B. Fox, Manesh S. Patel
Common Ownership: Do Managers Really Compete Less?, Merritt B. Fox, Manesh S. Patel
Faculty Scholarship
This Article addresses an important question in modern antitrust: when large investment funds have holdings across an industry, is competition depressed?
The question of the impact of common ownership on competition has gained much attention as the role of institutional shareholding has grown, with the funds of the three largest management companies holding in aggregate approximately 21% of the shares of a typical S&P 500 firm. It is a source of acute disagreement among scholars and policymakers, with some who believe common ownership does depress competition seeking antitrust law reforms that would significantly constrain how investment funds operate. Neglected in …
Vertical Mergers In A Model Of Upstream Monopoly And Incomplete Information, Serge Moresi, David Reitman, Steven C. Salop, Yianis Sarafidis
Vertical Mergers In A Model Of Upstream Monopoly And Incomplete Information, Serge Moresi, David Reitman, Steven C. Salop, Yianis Sarafidis
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
We examine the role of private information on the impact of vertical mergers. A vertical merger can improve the information that is available to an upstream monopolist because, after the merger, the monopolist can observe the cost of its downstream merger partner. In the pre-merger world, because the costs of the downstream firms are private information, the monopolist has incomplete information and cannot implement the monopoly outcome: The expected pre-merger equilibrium price of the downstream product is lower than the monopoly price. After a vertical merger, the equilibrium input price that is charged to the downstream rival can either increase …