Law Commons^™

Tying And Bundled Discounts: An Equilibrium Analysis Of Antitrust Liability Tests, Melanie S. Williams

Melanie S. Williams

Courts have struggled with determining when bundled discounts constitute unlawfully anticompetitive behavior. The current circuit split reflects an absence of consensus. This lack of legal guidance creates uncertainty in the market, with firms being given inconsistent – and sometimes contradictory - standards on how to avoid antitrust liability.

For the most part, we consider a standard paradigm for analyzing bundled discounts. Suppose that there are two firms. Firm 1 produces a monopoly product, A, and also another product, B, which competes with another version of B produced by Firm 2. The concern is the extent to which the price paid …

Devising A Microsoft Remedy That Serves Consumers, John E. Lopatka, William H. Page

William H. Page

According to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, Microsoft was a “predacious” monopolizer that did extensive “violence . . . to the competitive process.” Through a “single, well-coordinated course” of anticompetitive action, it suppressed competition from Netscape's Navigator, an Internet browser, and from Sun's Java programming language and related technologies. Microsoft “mounted a deliberate assault upon entrepreneurial efforts, . . . placed an oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune, . . . and trammeled the competitive process.” Having colorfully concluded that Microsoft's offenses were extreme, Judge Jackson deferred to the government's demand for a drastic remedy. He ordered that Microsoft …

A Critical Appraisal Of The Legal Framework For Mergers And Acquisitions In Nigeria, Oluwaseun Viyon Ojo

Oluwaseun Viyon Ojo

ABSTRACT Mergers and Acquisitions is popularly gaining ground as a corporate option and strategy amongst companies desirous of staying afloat in business, increasing profitability, wanting expansion and complying with regulatory directives .As such, it bears similarly an important status in the Nigerian Company law and, hopefully there exists a legal framework for its regulation under relevant Statutes and regulations within the corporate sector. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of the concept of mergers and acquisitions from the definitional perspective, reasons for and types with reference to the relevant source materials on the concept. The paper will consider the history …

Antitrust And The Patent System: A Reexamination, Herbert Hovenkamp

Herbert Hovenkamp

Since the federal antitrust laws were first passed they have cycled through extreme positions on the relationship between competition law and the patent system. Previous studies of antitrust and the patent system have generally assumed that patents are valid, discrete, and generally of high quality in the sense that they further innovation. As a result, increasing the returns to patenting increases the incentive to do socially valuable innovation. Further, if the returns to the patentee exceed the social losses caused by increased exclusion, the tradeoff is positive and antitrust should not interfere. If a patent does nothing to further innovation, …