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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Looming Crisis In Antitrust Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
The Looming Crisis In Antitrust Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
As in so many areas of law and politics in the United States, antitrust’s center is at bay. It is besieged by a right wing that wants to limit antitrust even more than it has been limited over the last quarter century. On the left, it faces revisionists who propose significantly greater enforcement.
One thing the two extremes share, however, is denigration of the role of economics in antitrust analysis. On the right, the Supreme Court’s two most recent antitrust decisions at this writing reveal that economic analysis no longer occupies the central role that it once had. On the …
Is The Digital Economy Too Concentrated?, Jonathan Klick
Is The Digital Economy Too Concentrated?, Jonathan Klick
All Faculty Scholarship
Concentration in the digital economy in the United States has sparked loud criticism and spurred calls for wide-ranging reforms. These reforms include everything from increased enforcement of existing antitrust laws, such as challenging more mergers and breaking up firms, to an abandonment of the consumer welfare standard. Critics cite corruption and more systemic public choice problems, while others invoke the populist origins of antitrust to slay the digital Goliaths. On the other side, there is skepticism regarding these arguments. This chapter continues much of that skepticism.
Is China Stealing Our Tech? A Look Into The Role Of Intellectual Property Rights In Us-China Trade Relations, Ryan Chester
Is China Stealing Our Tech? A Look Into The Role Of Intellectual Property Rights In Us-China Trade Relations, Ryan Chester
Honors Scholar Theses
This thesis aims to further the current scholarship on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and their effects on international trade and the US-China trade relationship more specifically. The main analysis of this thesis is a quantitative cross-country analysis of over 100 countries to see how IPR plays a role in international trade, while analyzing how the Sino-US trade relationship fits into larger trends. This thesis aims to answer the questions as follows: What are the current policies surrounding Intellectual Property Rights between China and the US? Does increasing the strength of IPR laws influence imports? Does the strength of a country’s …
Given Today's New Wave Of Protectionsim, Is Antitrust Law The Last Hope For Preserving A Free Global Economy Or Another Nail In Free Trade's Coffin?, Allison Murray
Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review
No abstract provided.
Platforms And The Rule Of Reason: The American Express Case, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Platforms And The Rule Of Reason: The American Express Case, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
In Ohio v. American Express Co., the Supreme Court applied antitrust’s rule of reason to a two-sided platform. The challenge was to an “anti-steering” rule, a vertical restraint preventing merchants from shifting customers who offered an AmEx card from to a less costly alternative such as Visa or Mastercard.
A two-sided platform is a business that depends on relationships between two different, noncompeting groups of transaction partners. For example, a printed periodical such as a newspaper earns revenue by selling both advertising and subscriptions to the paper itself. Success depends on a platform’s ability to maintain the appropriate balance …
Hipster Antitrust: New Bottles, Same Old W(H)Ine?, Christopher S. Yoo
Hipster Antitrust: New Bottles, Same Old W(H)Ine?, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Although the debate over hipster antitrust is often portrayed as something new, experienced observers recognize it as a replay of an old argument that was resolved by the global consensus that antitrust should focus on consumer welfare rather than on the size of firms, the levels of industry concentration, and other considerations. Moreover, the history of the Federal Trade Commission’s Section 5 authority to prevent unfair methods of competition stands as a reminder of the dangers of allowing enforcement policy to be guided by vague and uncertain standards.
Antitrust And Information Technologies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Antitrust And Information Technologies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
Technological change strongly affects the use of information to facilitate anticompetitive practices. The effects result mainly from digitization and the many products and processes that it enables. These technologies of information also account for a significant portion of the difficulties that antitrust law encounters when its addresses intellectual property rights. In addition, changes in the technologies of information affect the structures of certain products, in the process either increasing or decreasing the potential for competitive harm.
For example, digital technology affects the way firms exercise market power, but it also imposes serious measurement difficulties. The digital revolution has occurred in …
Antitrust, Competition Policy, And Inequality, Jonathan B. Baker, Steven C. Salop
Antitrust, Competition Policy, And Inequality, Jonathan B. Baker, Steven C. Salop
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off, leaving the median household less well off. The serious economic, political and moral issues raised by inequality can be addressed through a panoply of public policies including competition policy, the focus of this article. The article describes the channels through which market power contributes to inequality, and sets forth a range of possible antitrust policy …
Implementing Antitrust's Welfare Goals, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Implementing Antitrust's Welfare Goals, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
United States antitrust policy is said to promote some version of economic welfare. Antitrust promotes allocative efficiency by ensuring that markets are as competitive as they can practicably be, and that firms do not face unreasonable roadblocks to attaining productive efficiency, which refers to both cost minimization and innovation. One important welfare debate is whether antitrust should adopt a “consumer welfare” principle rather than a more general “total welfare” principle.
The simple version of the consumer welfare test is not a balancing test. If consumers are harmed by reduced output or higher prices resulting from the exercise of market power, …
Harm To Competition Under The 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Harm To Competition Under The 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
In August, 2010, the Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission issued new Guidelines for assessing the competitive effects of horizontal mergers under the antitrust laws. These Guidelines were long awaited not merely because of the lengthy interval between them and previous Guidelines but also because enforcement policy had drifted far from the standards articulated in the previous Guidelines. The 2010 Guidelines are distinctive mainly for two things. One is briefer and less detailed treatment of market delineation. The other is an expanded set of theories of harm that justify preventing mergers or reversing mergers that have already occurred.
The …
Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo
Is There A Role For Common Carriage In An Internet-Based World?, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
During the course of the network neutrality debate, advocates have proposed extending common carriage regulation to broadband Internet access services. Others have endorsed extending common carriage to a wide range of other Internet-based services, including search engines, cloud computing, Apple devices, online maps, and social networks. All too often, however, those who focus exclusively on the Internet era pay too little attention to the lessons of the legacy of regulated industries, which has long struggled to develop a coherent rationale for determining which industries should be subject to common carriage. Of the four rationales for determining the scope of common …
When Antitrust Met Facebook, Christopher S. Yoo
When Antitrust Met Facebook, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
Social networks are among the hottest phenomena on the Internet. Facebook eclipsed Google as the most visited website in both 2010 and 2011. Moreover, according to Nielsen estimates, as of the end of 2011 the average American spent nearly seven hours per month on Facebook, which is more time than they spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Microsoft, and Wikipedia combined. LinkedIn’s May 19, 2011 initial public offering (“IPO”) surpassed expectations, placing the value of the company at nearly $9 billion, and approximately a year later, its stock price had risen another 20 percent. Facebook followed suit a year later with …
Rummaging Through The Bottom Of Pandora’S Box: Funding Predatory Pricing Through Contemporaneous Recoupment, Shaun D. Ledgerwood, Wesley J. Heath
Rummaging Through The Bottom Of Pandora’S Box: Funding Predatory Pricing Through Contemporaneous Recoupment, Shaun D. Ledgerwood, Wesley J. Heath
Shaun D. Ledgerwood
Predatory pricing doctrine is currently a dead area of the law. To proceed beyond summary judgment, a plaintiff must prove the predation created a "dangerous probability" of supracompetitive pricing as the mechanism for recouping the losses “invested” in the predation. This requires proof that the predator sold products below its average variable cost and raised an entry barrier that ultimately enabled the recoupment of profits at some later time. We offer an alternative to this two-phased recoupment model. In this paper we show that a multiproduct retailer can target loss leading behavior in a market segment to punish or eliminate …
Market Power In Chinese Taipei: Laws, Policies And Treatments, Kung-Chung Liu, Yun-Peng Chu
Market Power In Chinese Taipei: Laws, Policies And Treatments, Kung-Chung Liu, Yun-Peng Chu
Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law
The experience of Chinese Taipei shows that opening up a previously protected market to new entrants can be a more effective and reliable way to enhance competition than regulating the behavior of dominant or monopolistic firms. Moreover, when opening up the market, the liberalizing measures adopted by government should be market-structure-neutral. That is, it should not try to dictate the direction and results of market competition. A more pressure-resistant mechanism should be designed to deal with market power, taking the form of a regime that is cross-sector, independent and collective in its decision-making, such as has been the case with …