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Full-Text Articles in Law
Balancing Effects Across Markets, Daniel A. Crane
Balancing Effects Across Markets, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
In Philadelphia National Bank (PNB), the Supreme Court held that it is improper to weigh a merger's procompetitive effects in one market against the merger's anticompetitive effects in another. The merger in question, which ostensibly reduced retail competition in the Philadelphia area, could not be justified on the grounds that it increased competition against New York banks and hence perhaps enhanced competition in business banking in the mid-Atlantic region. I will refer to the Supreme Court's prohibition on balancing effects across markets as a "market-specificity" rule. Under this rule, efficiencies that may counterbalance anticompetitive aspects must be specific to …
Conditional Pricing And Monopolization: A Reflection On The State Of Play, Daniel A. Crane
Conditional Pricing And Monopolization: A Reflection On The State Of Play, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Conditional pricing practices--including bundled discounting, loyalty rebating, and market share discounts--are not new phenomena in the U.S. market. Their potentially exclusionary consequences were raised in antitrust cases decades ago. But unlike trying or exlcusive dealing--which have a rich hsitory of case law and scholarly converage--conditioanl pricing practices did not emerge as salient to the antitrust community until a little over a decade ago. Two federal appellate decisions in the early 2000s--Concord Boar on market share rebates adn LePage's on bundled discounting--sparked a period of intensive interest and activity on these topics in teh antitrust agencies, courts, bench, and legal …
Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane
Market Power Without Market Definition, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Antitrust law has traditionally required proof of market power in most cases and has analyzed market power through a market definition/market share lens. In recent years, this indirect or structural approach to proving market power has come under attack as misguided in practice and intellectually incoherent. If market definition collapses in the courts and antitrust agencies, as it seems poised to do, this will rupture antitrust analysis and create urgent pressures for an alternative approach to proving market power through direct evidence. None of the leading theoretic approaches—such as the Lerner Index or a search for supracompetitive profits—provides a robust …
Does Monopoly Broth Make Bad Soup?, Daniel A. Crane
Does Monopoly Broth Make Bad Soup?, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
There is an oft-repeated maxim in U.S. antitrust law that a monopolist's conduct must be examined in its totality in order to determine its legality. Judges admonish that plaintiffs "should be given the full benefit of their proof without tightly compartmentalizating the various factual components and wiping the slate clean after scrutiny of each." As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit stated in much-quoted language, "It is the mix of various ingredients ... in a monopoly broth that produces the unsavory flavor."' In this article, I examine the use and misuse of monopoly broth theories. Reflecting a …
Attempts And Monopolization: A Mildly Expansionary Answer To The Prophylactic Riddle Of Section Two, Edward H. Cooper
Attempts And Monopolization: A Mildly Expansionary Answer To The Prophylactic Riddle Of Section Two, Edward H. Cooper
Articles
The efforts of activist antitrust lawyers to redefine the contours of attempted monopolization under section 2 of the Sherman Act1 have again forced the courts to wrestle with the classic antitrust dilemma: How far must single-firm competitive behavior be restrained to make competition free? The answer given by the majority of current decisions is that, absent some other established offense, single-firm behavior should be prohibited as an attempt to monopolize only when there is a specific intent to monopolize and the firm has come dangerously near to unlawful monopolization. A contemporary challenge to this orthodox answer is rapidly gaining force. …
The Standard Oil Decision: The Rule Of Reason, Horace Lafayette Wilgus
The Standard Oil Decision: The Rule Of Reason, Horace Lafayette Wilgus
Articles
After twenty-one years the Sherman Anti Trust Act has been applied to the typical combination restraining interstate commerce, which that act was designed to prevent.