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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Law
Analyzing Horizontal Mergers: Unilateral Effects In Product-Differentiated Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Analyzing Horizontal Mergers: Unilateral Effects In Product-Differentiated Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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This essay offers a brief, non-technical exposition of the antitrust analysis of horizontal mergers in product differentiated markets where the resulting price increase is thought to be unilateral - that is, only the post-merger firm increases its prices while other firms in the market do not. More realistically, non-merging firms who are reasonably close in product space to the merging firm will also be able to increase their prices when the post-merger firm's prices rise. The unilateral effects theory is robust and has become quite conventional in merger analysis. There is certainly no reason for thinking that it involves any …
The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain …
Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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"Separation of ownership and control" is a phrase whose history will forever be associated with Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), as well as with Institutionalist economics, Legal Realism, and the New Deal. Within that milieu the large publicly held business corporation became identified with excessive managerial power at the expense of stockholders, social irresponsibility, and internal inefficiency. Neoclassical economists both then and ever since have generally been critical, both of the historical facts that Berle and Means purported to describe and of the conclusions that they drew. In fact, however, within …
United States Competition Policy In Crisis: 1890-1955, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
United States Competition Policy In Crisis: 1890-1955, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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The development of marginalist, or neoclassical, economics led to a fifty-year long crisis in competition theory. Given an industrial structure with sufficient fixed costs, competition always became "ruinous," forcing firms to cut prices to marginal cost without sufficient revenue remaining to pay off investment. Early neoclassicists such as Alfred Marshall were not able to solve this problem, and as a result many economists were hostile toward the antitrust laws in the early decades of the twentieth century. The ruinous competition debate came to an abrupt end in the early 1930's, when Joan Robinson and particularly Edward Chamberlin developed models that …
The Viability Of Antitrust Price Squeeze Claims, Erik Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Viability Of Antitrust Price Squeeze Claims, Erik Hovenkamp, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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A price squeeze occurs when a vertically integrated firm "squeezes' a rival's margins between a high wholesale price for an essential input sold to the rival, and a low output price to consumers for whom the two firms compete. Price squeezes have been a recognized but controversial antitrust violation for two-thirds of a century. We examine the law and economics of the price squeeze, beginning with Judge Hand's famous discussion in the Alcoa case in 1945. While Alcoa has been widely portrayed as creating a "fairness" or "fair profit" test for unlawful price squeezes, Judge Hand actually adopted a cost-based …