Law Commons^™

Consumer Choice As The Best Way To Describe The Goals Of Competition Law, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is both a short introduction to the Consumer Choice explanation for Competition Law or Antitrust Law, and also a short advocacy piece suggesting that Consumer Choice is the best way to articulate the goals of European Competition Law and United States Antitrust Law.

This article briefly:

1. defines the consumer choice approach to antitrust or competition law and shows how it differs from other approaches;
2. shows that the antitrust statutes and theories of violation embody a concern for optimal levels of consumer choice;
3. shows that the United States antitrust case law embodies a concern for optimal levels of consumer …

Commentary: Implications Of Professor Scherer's Research For The Future Of Antitrust, Robert H. Lande

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One way to test the accuracy of Professor Scherer's research is to compare it to the best previous work in the area. Prior to his current article the best analysis of the state of economic thinking and knowledge during antitrust's formative period was presented twelve years ago by—Professor Scherer. This was a skeletal precurser to the well-documented version that he now presents, but his overall conclusions are identical. During the twelve years since his conclusions were presented in the Yale Law Journal no one has demonstrated that his research is in any way faulty or misleading, even though many have …

Do The Doj Vertical Restraints Guidelines Provide Guidance?, Alan A. Fisher Ph.D., Frederick I. Johnson, Robert H. Lande

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Vertical restraints come in a glittering menu of exceptional variety, including resale price maintenance (RPM), tying, exclusive dealing, requirements contracts, "best efforts" clauses, full-line forcing, airtight and nonairtight exclusive territories, customer restrictions, areas of primary responsibility, profit-passover provisions, restrictions on locations of outlets, and dual distribution. Firms sometimes combine vertical restraints into packages. The great variety of individual and combined vertical restraints complicates the discovery of market effects. Indeed, identifying what restraint(s) a given firm is using at any particular time can be difficult.