Since 1975, when the debate over monopolistic predation began to boil in courts and universities, most discussion has focused on predatory pricing. And although the allegation of predatory innovation arose in some well-known litigation involving Kodak and IBM, lawyers and economists have produced little credible work explaining how this phenomenon can occur, let alone how it should be identified and remedied if deemed to threaten consumer welfare.
Antitrust law currently lacks a unified theory of liability and damages. But the Supreme Court's recent acceptance of consumer welfare as the goal of antitrust law underscores a growing judicial inclination to construe antitrust liability rules to encourage efficient production and efficient resource allocation. As the Court reconstructs the law of antitrust liability, it should also revise the law of antitrust damages by defining the rights created by those damage measures to accomplish specific economic goals.
A routine defensive tactic of targets of hostile tender offers is to seek a preliminary injunction under section 16 of the Clayton Act on the ground that the offeror's acquisition of the target's stock would effect a merger violating section 7 of the Act. The litigation costs that an antitrust injunction imposes on an offeror seems unlikely to exceed the offeror's risk-adjusted expected benefit from the takeover. In this Article, I discuss several reasons why the possibility of delay tendes to discourage a potential offeror from ever making a tender offer.
Through its antitrust enforcement system, society allocates resources to deter anticompetitive behavior. Antitrust enforcement is costly because prosecutors and judges mischaracterize some competitive or efficiency-enhancing behavior as horizontal collusion. In this early application of the Polinsky-Shavell argument about the tradeoff between the probability and magnitude of fines, this essay argues that, given prosecutorial and judicial error, society will not optimally allocate its antitrust enforcement resources by threatening price fixers with exorbitant economic penalties that have only a minimal probability of being enforced.
Current controversies over patent policy place standard-setting organizations (SSOs) on a collision course with antitrust law. Recent theoretical research conjectures that, in an SSO, patent owners can "hold up" patent users in the sense of demanding high royalties for a patented input after the SSO has adopted the patented technology as an industry standard and manufacturers within the SSO have incurred sunk costs to design end products that incorporate that standard.
We examine the consumer-welfare implications of Google's project to scan a large proportion of the world's books into digital form and to make these works accessible to consumers through Google Book Search (GBS). In response to a class action alleging copyright infringement, Google has agreed to a settlement with the plaintiffs, which include the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.
We favor revision of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines.1 Our preliminary comments in this essay are based on a work in progress that we provisionally entitle, "Favoring Dynamic Competition over Static Competition."
Competition authorities in foreign jurisdictions have recently adopted or are considering guidelines on applying competition law to intellectual property rights (IPR). A common concern that certain exercises of IPR can restrict competition underlies IPR provisions that would enable competition authorities to compel holders of IPR to license their IP at regulated royalties.
The OECD's proposed regime of asymmetric ex ante regulation for Mexico's telecommunications marketplace would reduce competition, contrary to the OECD's aims. The OECD's proposals would harm Mexican consumers and force an increase in prices paid for telecommunications services. They would create a government-sanctioned price cartel among the telecommunications providers.
A recent phenomenon in competition policy is the acquisition of a private firm by an enterprise that is either wholly owned by government or in the midst of privatization.
