Law Commons^™

The Never-Ending Quest For Clarity Amidst Uncertainty: Hospital M&A And Antitrust Scrutiny, Ross E. Bautista

San Diego Law Review

Although critics say hospitals justify mergers in the same way as they did during the M&A boom of the 1990s, these critics frequently link the current wave of mergers with the purpose of becoming more integrated and efficient to achieve the level of cost savings and improved quality that the United States and patients currently require. However, the results from hospital consolidation remain uncertain because of the limited and mixed evidence about its impact on quality of care and price. Part I of this Article discusses the recent surge in hospital M&A activity. Part II brings some clarity by discussing …

Appraising Merger Efficiencies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Mergers of business firms violate the antitrust laws when they threaten to lessen competition, which generally refers to a price increase resulting from a reduction in output. However, a merger that threatens competition may also enable the post-merger firm to reduce its costs or improve its product. Attitudes toward mergers are heavily driven by assumptions about efficiency gains. If mergers of competitors never produced efficiency gains but simply reduced the number of competitors, a strong presumption against them would be warranted. We tolerate most mergers because of a background, highly generalized belief that most or at least many produce cost …

The Raising Rivals' Cost Foreclosure Paradigm, Conditional Pricing Practices, And The Flawed Incremental Price-Cost Test, Steven C. Salop

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There are two overarching legal paradigms for analyzing exclusionary conduct in antitrust – predatory pricing and the raising rivals’ costs characterization of foreclosure. Sometimes the choice of paradigm is obvious. Other times, it may depend on the structure of the plaintiff’s allegations. Some types of conduct, notably conditional pricing practices (CPPs), might appear by analogy to fit into both paradigms. CPPs involve pricing that is conditioned on exclusivity or some other type of favoritism in a customer’s purchases or input supplier’s sales. The predatory pricing paradigm would attack the low prices of CPPs. By contrast, the RRC foreclosure paradigm would …

Market Power And Inequality: The Antitrust Counterrevolution And Its Discontents, Lina M. Khan, Sandeep Vaheesan

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, economic inequality has become a central topic of public debate in the United States and much of the developed world. The popularity of Thomas Piketty’s nearly 700-page tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a testament to this newfound focus on economic disparity. As top intellectuals, politicians, and public figures have come to recognize inequality as a major problem that must be addressed, they have offered a range of potential solutions. Frequently mentioned proposals include reforming the tax system, strengthening organized labor, revising international trade and investment agreements, and reducing the size of the financial sector.

One …