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Full-Text Articles in Law
What’S In Your Wallet (And What Should The Law Do About It?), Natasha Sarin
What’S In Your Wallet (And What Should The Law Do About It?), Natasha Sarin
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In traditional markets, firms can charge prices that are significantly elevated relative to their costs only if there is a market failure. However, this is not true in a two-sided market (like Amazon, Uber, and Mastercard), where firms often subsidize one side of the market and generate revenue from the other. This means consideration of one side of the market in isolation is problematic. The Court embraced this view in Ohio v. American Express, requiring that anticompetitive harm on one side of a two-sided market be weighed against benefits on the other side.
Legal scholars denounce this decision, which, …
Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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A legal system that relies on private property rights to promote economic development must consider that profits can come from two different sources. First, both competition under constant technology and innovation promote economic growth by granting many of the returns to the successful developer. Competition and innovation both increase output, whether measured by quantity or quality. Second, however, profits can come from practices that reduce output, in some cases by reducing quantity, or in others by reducing innovation.
IP rights and competition policy were traditionally regarded as in conflict. IP rights create monopoly, which was thought to be inimical to …
Antitrust And The Design Of Production, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust And The Design Of Production, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
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Both economics and antitrust policy have traditionally distinguished “production” from “distribution.” The former is concerned with how products are designed and built, the latter with how they are placed into the hands of consumers. Nothing in the language of the antitrust laws suggests much concern with production as such. Although courts do not view it that way, even per se unlawful naked price fixing among rivals is a restraint on distribution rather than production. Naked price fixing assumes a product that has already been designed and built, and the important cartel decision is what should be each firm’s output, or …
Merger Review By The Federal Communications Commission: Comcast-Nbc Universal, Christopher S. Yoo
Merger Review By The Federal Communications Commission: Comcast-Nbc Universal, Christopher S. Yoo
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The Communications Act of 1934 created a dual review process in which mergers in the communications industry are reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as well as the antitrust authorities. Commentators have criticized dual review not only as costly and redundant, but also as subject to substantive and procedural abuse. The process of clearing the 2011 Comcast-NBC Universal merger provides a useful case study to examine whether such concerns are justified. A review of the empirical context reveals that the FCC intervened even though the relevant markets were not structured in a way that would ordinarily raise anticompetitive concerns. …