Law Commons^™

Services, Intellectual Property And The Major Issues Of The Uruguay Round, Claude E. Barfield

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Antitrust, Institutions, And Merger Control, D. Daniel Sokol

D. Daniel Sokol

This Article makes two primary contributions to the antitrust literature. First, it identifies the dynamic interrelationship across antitrust institutions. Second, it provides new empirical evidence from practitioner surveys to explore how the dynamic institutional interrelationship plays out in the area of merger control. This Article provides a descriptive, analytical overview of the various institutions to better frame the larger institutional interrelations for a comparative institutional analysis. In the next Part it examines mergers as a case study of how one might apply antitrust institutional analysis across these different kinds and levels of antitrust institutions. The Article utilizes both quantitative and …

E-Books, Collusion, And Antitrust Policy: Protecting A Dominant Firm At The Cost Of Innovation, Nicholas Timchalk

Seattle University Law Review

Amazon’s main rival, Apple, went to great lengths and took major risks to enter the e-book market. Why did Apple simply choose not to compete on the merits of its product and brand equity (the iPad and iBookstore) as it does with its other products? Why did Apple decide not to continue to rely on its earlier success of situating its products differently in the market than other electronics and working hard to be different and cutting-edge with its e-book delivery? This Note argues that the combination of Amazon’s 90% market share, network externalities, and an innovative technology market creates …

A Comprehensive Economic And Legal Analysis Of Tying Arrangements, Guy Sagi

Seattle University Law Review

The law of tying arrangements as it stands does not correspond with modern economic analysis. Therefore, and because tying arrangements are so widely common, the law is expected to change and extensive academic writing is currently attempting to guide its way. In tying arrangements, monopolistic firms coerce consumers to buy additional products or services beyond what they intended to purchase. This pressure can be applied because a consumer in a monopolistic market does not have the alternative to buy the product or service from a competing firm. In the absence of such choice, the monopolistic firm can allegedly force the …

The Appropriate Legal Standard And Sufficient Economic Evidence For Exclusive Dealing Under Section 2: The Ftc’S Mcwane Case, Steven C. Salop, Sharis A. Pozen, John R. Seward

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The FTC recently found McWane, Inc. liable for unlawful monopoly maintenance by a 3-1 majority. The dispute among the FTC Commissioners raises important and interesting issues regarding the law and economics of exclusive dealing and the proper evaluation of the competitive effects of exclusionary conduct. Commissioner Wright’s Dissent proposes and utilizes a new legal standard that requires the plaintiff to show “clear evidence” of harm to competition before shifting the burden to the defendant to show procompetitive efficiency benefits. This burden of proof and production on the plaintiff is much higher than showing “probable effect” based on a preponderance of …

Framing A Purpose For Corporate Law, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

This article seeks to frame a short statement of purpose for corporate law on which all reasonable observers can agree. The statement, in order to succeed at its intended purpose, must satisfy two strict conditions: first, it must have enough content to be meaningful; second, it must be completely uncontroversial, both descriptively and normatively. The exercise, thus described, involves avoiding the issues that occupy center stage in discussions about corporate law while at the same time highlighting the discussants’ generally held presuppositions. Three closely interconnected issues arise. First, whether the statement of the purpose of corporate law should speak in …

Merger Policy And The 2010 Merger Guidelines, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

New Horizontal Merger Guidelines were issued jointly by the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission in August, 2010, replacing Guidelines issued in 1992 that no longer reflected either the law or government enforcement policy. The new Guidelines are a striking improvement. They are less technocratic, accommodating a greater and more realistic variety of theories about why mergers of competitors can be anticompetitive and, accordingly, a greater variety of methodologies for assessing them.

The unifying theme of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines is to prevent the enhancement of market power that might result from mergers. The 2010 Guidelines state that “[a] …

Possible Paradigm Shifts In Broadband Policy, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Debates over Internet policy tend to be framed by the way the Internet existed in the mid-1990s, when the Internet first became a mass-market phenomenon. At the risk of oversimplifying, the Internet was initially used by academics and tech-savvy early adopters to send email and browse the web over a personal computer connected to a telephone line via networks interconnected through in a limited way. Since then, the Internet has become much larger and more diverse in terms of users, applications, technologies, and business relationships. More recently, Internet growth has begun to slow both in terms of the number of …

Consumer Welfare In Competition And Intellectual Property Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Whether antitrust policy should pursue a goal of "general welfare" or "consumer welfare" has been debated for decades. The academic debate is much more varied than the case law, however, which has consistently adopted consumer welfare as a goal, almost never condemning a practice found to produce an actual output reduction or price increase simply because productive efficiency gains accruing to producers exceeded consumer losses.

While some practices such as mergers might produce greater gains in productive efficiency than losses in consumer welfare, identifying such situations would be extraordinarily difficult. First, these efficiencies would have to be "transaction specific," meaning …

Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …