Law Commons^™

Monopolizing Digital Commerce, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Section 2 of the Sherman Act condemns firms who “monopolize,” “attempt to monopolize,” or “combine or conspire” to monopolize—all without explanation. Section 2 is the antitrust law’s only provision that reaches entirely unilateral conduct, although it has often been used to reach collaborative conduct as well. In general, § 2 requires greater amounts of individually held market power than do the other antitrust statutes, but it is less categorical about conduct. With one exception, however, the statute reads so broadly that criticisms of the nature that it is outdated cannot be based on faithful readings of the text.

The one …

Beyond Brooke Group: Bringing Reality To The Law Of Predatory Pricing, C. Scott Hemphill, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

This Feature offers a roadmap for bringing and deciding predatory pricing cases under the Supreme Court’s restrictive Brooke Group decision. Brooke Group requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant set a price below cost and had a sufficient likelihood of recouping its investment in predation. This framework, which was adopted without any contested presentation of its merits, has endured despite its flaws. Beyond this framework, the Court opined in dicta that predation is implausible.

We identify points of flexibility within the Court’s framework that permit an empirically grounded evaluation of the predation claim. Under the price-cost test, a plaintiff …

Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other …

The European Commission's Ecs/Akzo Standard For Predatory Pricing In The E.E.C.: Deterrence Or Disorder?, Thomas G. Ehr

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Predatory Pricing, George A. Hay

George A. Hay

No abstract provided.

Pigeonholes In Antitrust, George A. Hay

George A. Hay

No abstract provided.

The Economics Of Predatory Pricing, George A. Hay

George A. Hay

The revival of interest among economists in predatory pricing, spawned by Areeda and Turner's 1975 article, and the tidal wave of literature which has followed, creates a serious problem for the lawyer interested in keeping up with what economists are saying on the subject. Articles appearing in the standard economics journals are often inaccessible, due to the advanced level of mathematics normally employed, and seem of little apparent relevance, due to the detailed but often artificially sounding assumptions used to generate conclusions. The materials appearing in law reviews, while perhaps less technical, is voluminous and not always original, Worst of …

Predatory Pricing: Competing Economic Theories And The Evolution Of Legal Standards, Joseph F. Brodley, George A. Hay

George A. Hay

Recent years have witnessed a virtual explosion in the legal and economic literature dealing with predatory pricing. Equally dramatic has been the swift adoption by several courts of policy conclusions derived from this literature—a development that is startling, given the complexity and volume of the literature and the lack of consensus among legal and economic scholars. The result has been to raise an acute problem for lawyers and judges who must assess the validity and applicability of competing economic models, mold stubborn and unruly facts to fit abstract economic theories, translate economic theories into legal doctrines, and resolve puzzling cost …

Predatory Pricing, Aaron S. Edlin

Aaron Edlin

Judge Breyer famously worried that aggressive prohibitions of predatory pricing throw away a bird in hand (low prices during the alleged predatory period) for a speculative bird in the bush (preventing higher prices thereafter). Here, I argue that there is no bird in hand because entry cannot be presumed. Moreover, it is plausibly commonplace that low prices or the threat of low prices produce anticompetitive results by reducing entry, inducing exit, and keeping prices high. I analyze three potential standards for identifying predatory pricing. Two are traditional but have been tangled together and must be distinguished. First, a price-cost test …

The Federal Trade Commission And The Sherman Act, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The FTC has explicit antitrust authority to enforce the Clayton Act, although not the Sherman Act. More than a half century ago, however, the Supreme Court held that the FTC Act’s prohibition of “unfair methods of competition” reaches everything the Sherman Act reaches and also a “penumbra” of practices that are not technical Sherman Act violations. That view, which had fallen into disuse in recent decades, is now being revived.

This essay defends a limited version of that “penumbra” view and suggests several applications. First, while both Sherman Act provisions are open ended in their coverage, they have limitations. Section …

The Law Of Exclusionary Pricing, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The success of the Areeda-Turner test for predatory pricing and the Supreme Court's adoption of demanding proof requirements in its 1993 Brooke Group decision have made it very difficult for plaintiffs to win conventional predatory pricing claims. While many challenges to exclusionary pricing continue to be made, the legal theory has evolved away from classical predation to a variety of other theories. These include challenges to quantity and market share discounts, single item and package discounts, and various purchasing practices, including slotting fees, overinvestment in fixed cost assets, and overbuying of variable cost inputs. Plaintiffs have enjoyed somewhat greater success …

The Fable Of Entry: Bounded Rationality, Market Discipline, And Legal Policy, Avishalom Tor

Michigan Law Review

Legal scholars have recently advanced a behavioral approach to the law and economics school of thought in an attempt to improve its external validity and predictive power. The hallmark of this new approach is the replacement of the perfectly rational actor with a "boundedly rational" decisionmaker who, apart from being affected by emotion and motivation, has only limited cognitive resources. To function effectively in a complex :world, boundedly rational individuals must rely on cognitive heuristics - simplifying mental shortcuts - that inevitably lead people to make some systematic decision errors; as a result, their behavior necessarily deviates from that predicted …

Still Preying On Strategic Reputation Models Of Predation, Peter H. Huang

Publications

No abstract provided.

Predatory Pricing, George A. Hay

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Anti-Trust And Economic Theory: Some Observations From The Us Experience, George A. Hay

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent developments in US anti-trust can be characterised as reflecting the uneasy interaction of two quite separate phenomena: first, the increased emphasis on economic analysis as the overriding organising principle of anti-trust policy and on economic efficiency as the primary (perhaps only) relevant goal for anti-trust; second, the long-standing reluctance of the federal judiciary to involve itself in any substantive economic analysis, and the preference, instead, for simple rules of thumb or ‘pigeon holes’ to sort out lawful from unlawful conduct. The result has been that while economics has played a major role, it has not influenced American anti-trust as …

Pigeonholes In Antitrust, George A. Hay

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The Economics Of Predatory Pricing, George A. Hay

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The revival of interest among economists in predatory pricing, spawned by Areeda and Turner's 1975 article, and the tidal wave of literature which has followed, creates a serious problem for the lawyer interested in keeping up with what economists are saying on the subject. Articles appearing in the standard economics journals are often inaccessible, due to the advanced level of mathematics normally employed, and seem of little apparent relevance, due to the detailed but often artificially sounding assumptions used to generate conclusions. The materials appearing in law reviews, while perhaps less technical, is voluminous and not always original, Worst of …

Predatory Pricing: Competing Economic Theories And The Evolution Of Legal Standards, Joseph F. Brodley, George A. Hay

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Recent years have witnessed a virtual explosion in the legal and economic literature dealing with predatory pricing. Equally dramatic has been the swift adoption by several courts of policy conclusions derived from this literature—a development that is startling, given the complexity and volume of the literature and the lack of consensus among legal and economic scholars. The result has been to raise an acute problem for lawyers and judges who must assess the validity and applicability of competing economic models, mold stubborn and unruly facts to fit abstract economic theories, translate economic theories into legal doctrines, and resolve puzzling cost …