President Biden rejects the economics-driven antitrust policies of the past 40 years. Flanked by his White House competition adviser and his new FTC Chair in July 2021, he asserted that the "experiment failed" and promised to return to earlier antitrust traditions. This report shows those...

The analytical framework of the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, first introduced by Bill Baxter in 1982, has been adopted by numerous Assistant Attorney Generals and Federal Trade Commission Chairmen of both political parties. For example, former Assistant Attorney General Charles James called the...

The Federal Trade Commission has investigated the structure and competitiveness of the petroleum industry many times over the past 100 years. Some of the Commission's most intensive investigations were initiated in response to Congressional inquiries, most notably the enormously expensive and...

Plastic payment cards are one of the great innovations of the twentieth century. Like the microchip, the personal computer, and the cellular telephone, payment cards have become ubiquitous after only a few decades of use, transforming the way business is conducted. Yet, payment card companies...

Professor Wright mischaracterizes both the legal basis and the factual context of the FTC's Three Tenors opinion, recently affirmed by Judge Ginsburg's opinion for a unanimous panel of United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Neither opinion's legal analysis relies on...

The US patent system is a foundation of our nation's economy, encouraging innovation and growth. The exclusive right to use and license an invention provides numerous benefits to its inventor and to the broader economy. The patent system is not costless, however, and significant costs stem from...

The FTC has enjoyed great success for decades, and I address four topics here in this paper presented at the opening session of the FTC's “Hearing on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century.” First, what durable success means for an agency like the FTC. Then, the vision I...

The antitrust agencies typically find customer reactions probative of the likely competitive effects of a merger. Thus, merger challenge data released by the FTC reveal that strong complaints from customers almost always lead to a government challenge. Nevertheless, some judges have been quite...

In 1979, the Supreme Court began departing from strict rule of reason/per se categorization and by 1999 the Court made clear that the rule of reason was a continuum. With the Court providing little guidance on the details of the conduct for which truncated analysis is warranted, the FTC has...