Law Commons^™

The Lawful Acquisition And Exercise Of Monopoly Power And Its Implications For The Objectives Of Antitrust, Keith N. Hylton, David S. Evans

Faculty Scholarship

The antitrust laws of the United States have, from their inception, allowed firms to acquire significant market power, to charge prices that reflect that market power, and to enjoy supra-competitive returns. This article shows that this policy, which was established by the U.S. Congress and affirmed repeatedly by the U.S. courts, reflects a tradeoff between the dynamic benefits that society realizes from allowing firms to secure significant rewards, including monopoly profits, from making risky investments and engaging in innovation; and the static costs that society incurs when firms with significant market power raise price and curtail output. That tradeoff results …

Unilateral Refusals To Deal And The Antitrust Modernization Commission Report, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The Antitrust Modernization Commission recommends that refusals to deal with rivals in the same market should rarely, if ever, be unlawful. I will focus on the principles that should determine the legal standard governing unilateral refusals to deal. A legal test that is strongly biased in favor of defendants, as the Commission recommends, is desirable as a default rule and especially in cases in which the essential facility at the core of the refusal to deal dispute is efficiency enhancing. However, there is another set of cases in which the defendant gains control of an essential market portal. In these …

Antitrust Law And Regulatory Gaming, Stacey Dogan

Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust law promotes competition in the service of economic efficiency. Government regulation may or may not promote either competition or efficiency, depending on both the goals of the agency and the effects of industry "capture." Antitrust courts have long included regulated industries within their purview, working to ensure that regulated industries could not use the limits that regulation imposes on the normal competitive process to achieve anticompetitive ends. Doing so makes sense; an antitrust law that ignored anticompetitive behavior in any regulated industry would be a law full of holes.

The role of antitrust in policing regulated industries appears to …