Law Commons^™

The Debilitating Effect Of Exclusive Rights: Patents And Productive Inefficiency, William Hubbard

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Are we underestimating the costs of patent protection? Scholars have long recognized that patent law is a double-edged sword. While patents promote innovation, they also limit the number of people who can benefit from new inventions. In the past, policy makers striving to balance the costs and benefits of patents have analyzed patent law through the lens of traditional, neoclassical economics. This Article argues that this approach is fundamentally flawed because traditional economics rely on an inaccurate oversimplification: that individuals and firms always maximize profits. In actuality, so-called "productive inefficiencies" often prevent profit maximization. For example, cognitive biases, bounded rationality, …

Recent Trends In Merger Enforcement In The United States: The Increasing Impact Of Economic Analysis, Robert H. Lande, James Langenfeld

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From its modern origins more than thirty years ago federal merger policy has centered around the use of standard surrogates for market power to make presumptions about the likely effects of mergers. Since that time it has been evolving towards an increasingly complex approach as economic considerations have expanded their influence on merger policy. This trend was solidified in the 1982 revision of the Department of Justice's Merger Guidelines, accelerated by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission 1992 Horizontal Merger Guidelines' increased emphasis on unilateral (as opposed to collusive) anticompetitive effects, and has reached new heights in the …

Countervailing Power—Different Rules For Different Markets? Conduct And Context In Antitrust Law And Economics, Barbara Ann White

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The focus of modern applications of economic reasoning to antitrust concerns has been on the more subtle efficiency or procompetitive dimensions of the scrutinized conduct. When any of these characteristics are discovered, the courts tend to find no antitrust violation.

Two major difficulties arise with this approach. First, efficiency or procompetitive aspects can almost always be uncovered in any corporate enterprise, creating the potential for legitimizing almost all business behavior. Second, the legal conclusions courts reach are typically couched in terms of the business practice itself; therefore, once upheld, that practice is implicitly validated for other unrelated marketplace scenarios. Indiscriminate …

Commentary: Implications Of Professor Scherer's Research For The Future Of Antitrust, Robert H. Lande

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One way to test the accuracy of Professor Scherer's research is to compare it to the best previous work in the area. Prior to his current article the best analysis of the state of economic thinking and knowledge during antitrust's formative period was presented twelve years ago by—Professor Scherer. This was a skeletal precurser to the well-documented version that he now presents, but his overall conclusions are identical. During the twelve years since his conclusions were presented in the Yale Law Journal no one has demonstrated that his research is in any way faulty or misleading, even though many have …

Chicago's False Foundation: Wealth Transfers (Not Just Efficiency) Should Guide Antitrust, Robert H. Lande

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My role today will be comparable to the small child's in the classic story of the Emperor's new clothes; I too have a simple truth to tell. The sole goal of antitrust is not to enhance economic efficiency. Increased economic efficiency is not even the primary goal of the antitrust laws. The main purpose of the antitrust laws is to prevent firms from acquiring and using market power to force consumers to pay more for their goods and services. Congress was primarily concerned that corporations would use market power "unfairly" to extract wealth from consumers. These wealth transfers were of …

Book Reviews: "Antitrust Law And Economics": Responding To An Ivory Tower Critique, Robert H. Lande

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No abstract provided.

Do The Doj Vertical Restraints Guidelines Provide Guidance?, Alan A. Fisher Ph.D., Frederick I. Johnson, Robert H. Lande

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Vertical restraints come in a glittering menu of exceptional variety, including resale price maintenance (RPM), tying, exclusive dealing, requirements contracts, "best efforts" clauses, full-line forcing, airtight and nonairtight exclusive territories, customer restrictions, areas of primary responsibility, profit-passover provisions, restrictions on locations of outlets, and dual distribution. Firms sometimes combine vertical restraints into packages. The great variety of individual and combined vertical restraints complicates the discovery of market effects. Indeed, identifying what restraint(s) a given firm is using at any particular time can be difficult.