Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Competition And Regulation In The Gold Industry: An American Perspective, Jared A. Wilkerson

W&M Law Student Publications

When taken from a domestic viewpoint, the primary gold market appears to be noncompetitive and marred by concentration. However, when seen at the global scale, it is clear that the primary gold market is competitive and diluted. Further, even if the primary market were noncompetitive and concentrated at the global level, that market probably could not readily affect the price of gold. Regardless of competitiveness, gold mines in the United States and elsewhere are subject to environmental and safety regulations that increase the cost of production; Regulations are stringently enforced in the United States as compared to competitor countries, potentially …

Reviving An Epithet: A New Way Forward For The Essential Facilities Doctrine, Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan

For sound economic reasons, the antitrust laws, in general, do not require firms to share their assets with rivals. When a particular asset has natural monopoly characteristics and is used as an input in other markets, however, the essential facilities doctrine requires that the asset be shared with firms in related markets. In recent decades, the Supreme Court and leading scholars have criticized the doctrine, claiming it is economically inefficient and taxes the institutional capacity of the judiciary.

Historically, the courts most often applied the doctrine to tangible natural monopolies like electric transmission grids and bottleneck railroad lines. In recent …

Relational Contract Theory And Management Contracts: A Paradigm For The Application Of The Theory Of The Norms, Michael Diathesopoulos

Michael Diathesopoulos

This paper examines management contracts as a paradigm for the application of relational contracts theory and especially of the theory of contractual and relational norms. This theory, deriving from Macauley's implications, but structured and analysed by I.R. MacNeil gives us a framework for the explanation and understanding of contractual obligations and business relations' rules and practice. After presenting the key literature about the norms theory and especially defining the content of MacNeil's norms, we define management contracts as relations, characterised by a high relational element and we explain why, investigating all their features, which make them a suitable object for …

Department Stores On Sale: An Antitrust Quandary, Mark D. Bauer

Mark D Bauer

In 2005, Macy’s bought its largest competitor, May Department Stores, for $17 billion. The resulting combination created a department store behemoth with over one thousand stores across the United States. Despite protests by the attorneys general of a number of states, and consumers and advocacy groups around the country, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) blessed this merger without requiring any modification in its terms. And according to law and economics scholars, this merger had no substantive impact on consumers, competition or consumer welfare.

My empirical research, published in an earlier law review article, showed that Macy’s now charges consumers 13% …

Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher Sprigman, Christopher Buccafusco

Christopher Sprigman

In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to as “endowment effects”. Traditional conceptions of the value of IP rely on assumptions about human rationality derived from classical economics. The law assumes that when people make decisions about buying, selling, and licensing IP they do so with fixed, context-independent preferences. Over the past several decades, this rational actor model of classical economics has come under attack by behavioral data showing that people do not always make strictly rational decisions. …

Lessons For Competition Law From The Economic Crisis: The Prospect For Antitrust Responses To The 'Too-Big-To-Fail' Phenomenon, Jesse Markham

Jesse Markham

This article explores the failure of antitrust law to prevent or intercede to remedy the catastrophic failures of large enterprises. Given the historic focus of antitrust on problems relating to the dangers of out-sized business enterprise, the failure of antitrust in this regard raises interesting questons about whether its mission has drifted from the law's original intent. The article explores the current relationship between antitrust rules and "bigness" and offers a modest proposal for reviving antitrust as a public policy tool that might help to address the too-big-to-fail phenomenon.