The United States central government enactment of the 1866 Post Roads Act preempted state and municipal telegraph franchise entry barriers. Like present-day telecommunication companies, local franchise regulations were an entry barrier to United States telegraph companies. These pre-1866 state...

The Supreme Court’s 1911 decision in Standard Oil gave us embryonic versions of two foundational standards of liability under the Sherman Act: the rule of reason under Section 1 and the monopoly power/exclusionary conduct test under Section 2. But a case filed later in 1911, United States v....

Coty Germany, GmbH v. Parfümerie Akzente, GmbH, a late 2017 decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), set off something of a tizzy along North Atlantic shores concerning the future of vertical restraints and distribution relationships in online commerce sectors. Generally, Coty seemed to...

The challenges and questions surrounding the design of a competition system are part of an identifiable life cycle that characterizes the development of a competition agency. The core challenges are to set priorities and execute them, but there are various potential obstacles. This article looks...

This paper examines vertical relationships in which a monopolistic upstream producer supplies a product through downstream distributors to consumers who may access multiple distributors (i.e., multi-homing). Given that there are multi-homing consumers, exclusive supply of a product induces more...

We study the implications of different contractual forms in a market with an incumbent upstream monopolist and free downstream entry. We show that traditional conclusions regarding the desirability of linear contracts radically change when entry in the downstream market is endogenous rather than...

We examine the implications of different contractual forms for welfare as well as for firms’ profits in a framework in which a vertically integrated firm sells its good to an independent downstream firm. Under downstream Bertrand competition, the standard result of the desirability of two-part...

We study competing vertical chains where upstream and downstream firms bargain over their form and terms of trading. Both (conditionally) inefficient wholesale price contracts and efficient contracts that take the form of price-quantity bundles (and not of two-tariffs) arise in equilibrium under...

Here, we study vertical foreclosure in a dynamic setup with learning-by-doing production technologies. There is a downstream monopoly and an upstream duopoly, where manufacturers produce differentiated products and can gain proficiency through the accumulation of their production. We study the...