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Antitrust and Trade Regulation

Selected Works

2015

FTC

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Josh Wright’S “Chicago School Papers”: An Overview, William H. Page Aug 2015

Josh Wright’S “Chicago School Papers”: An Overview, William H. Page

William H. Page

In what follows, I consider three of FTC Commissioner Josh Wright's “Chicago School Papers.” In these papers, Commissioner Wright considers the past, present, and future role of the Chicago School of antitrust analysis in the shaping of law and policy, offering along the way some interesting insights into what his priorities at the FTC are likely to be. The papers discussed have common themes: the mischaracterization of the “Chicago School,” the scientific advantage of dispensing altogether with “School” labels, and a focus on empirical findings in shaping antitrust analysis.


The Ftc's Procedural Advantage In Discovering Concerted Action, William H. Page Aug 2015

The Ftc's Procedural Advantage In Discovering Concerted Action, William H. Page

William H. Page

Scholars have long argued that Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act can or should be interpreted to reach more conduct than Section 1 of Sherman Act - whether, in other words, there are gaps in the coverage of Section 1 that allow certain forms of anticompetitive conduct that Section 5 should condemn. Perhaps the most important issue in the interpretation of Section 1 concerns how courts should distinguish conscious parallelism from unlawful concerted action. In this paper, I argue that there is no substantive gap between the two antitrust statutes on this issue-both statutes prohibit (and permit) the …


Recognizing The Limits Of Antitrust: The Roberts Court Versus The Enforcement Agencies, Thomas A. Lambert, Alden F. Abbott Apr 2015

Recognizing The Limits Of Antitrust: The Roberts Court Versus The Enforcement Agencies, Thomas A. Lambert, Alden F. Abbott

Thomas A. Lambert

As Judge Frank Easterbrook famously explained three decades ago, antitrust is an inherently limited body of law. In crafting and enforcing liability rules to combat market power and encourage competition, courts and regulators may err in two directions: they may wrongly forbid output-enhancing behavior or wrongly fail to condemn output-reducing conduct. The social losses from false convictions and false acquittals, taken together, comprise antitrust’s “error costs.” While it may be possible to reduce error costs by making liability rules more nuanced, added complexity raises the “decision costs” incurred by business planners (ex ante) and adjudicators (ex post …