Law Commons^™

The Price Of Abuse: Intel And The European Commission Decision, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

The May 13, 2009 decision by the European Commission ('EC') holding that Intel violated Article 82 of the Treaty of Rome and should be fined a record amount and prohibited from engaging in certain conduct, set off a predictable four part chorus of denunciations:

1. Intel did nothing wrong and was just competing hard;
2. Intel's discounts were good for consumers;;
3. The entire matter is just another example of Europeans protecting their own against a more efficient U.S. company; and;
4. Even if Intel did engage in anticompetitive activity, the fine was much too large. These assertions will be addressed in turn.;

United States Competition Policy In Crisis: 1890-1955, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The development of marginalist, or neoclassical, economics led to a fifty-year long crisis in competition theory. Given an industrial structure with sufficient fixed costs, competition always became "ruinous," forcing firms to cut prices to marginal cost without sufficient revenue remaining to pay off investment. Early neoclassicists such as Alfred Marshall were not able to solve this problem, and as a result many economists were hostile toward the antitrust laws in the early decades of the twentieth century. The ruinous competition debate came to an abrupt end in the early 1930's, when Joan Robinson and particularly Edward Chamberlin developed models that …