Although competition law and intellectual property have overlapping economic rationales, they frequently conflict. One area of conflict is vertical leveraging. This paper analyzes recent legislation and court decisions dealing with vertical leveraging. The main conclusion is that two policy...

Since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act (1897) and the Sherman Act (1890), regulation and antitrust have operated as competing mechanisms to control competition. Regulation produced cross-subsidies and favors to special interests, but specified prices and rules of mandatory dealing....

Is Internet an ideal model for a self-regulated economy? It seems possible to decentrely organize and render enforceable a property right system on which interindividual negotiations could be based. Moreover, traditional State intervention is no longer operable since Internet users can by pass...

Although antitrust courts sometimes stress the competitive process, they have not deeply explored what that process is. Inspired by the theory of the core, we explore the idea that the competitive process is the process of sellers and buyers forming improving coalitions. Much of antitrust can be...

We present a new welfare-based framework for optimally choosing legal standards in a variety of regulatory contexts. We formalise the decision-theoretic considerations widely discussed in the existing literature by capturing the quality of the underlying analysis and information available to a...

Predation occurs when a firm offers consumers favorable deals, usually in the short run, that get rid of competition and thereby harm consumers in the long run. Modern economic theory has shown how commitment or collective-action problems among consumers can lead to such paradoxical effects. But...

In several key industries, including semiconductors, biotechnology, computer software, and the Internet, our patent system is creating a patent thicket: an overlapping set of patent rights requiring that those seeking to commercialize new technology obtain licenses from multiple patentees. The...

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. Such an acquisition poses the question of how public ownership may alter the incentives of a firm to engage in...

This essay offers a brief, non-technical exposition of the antitrust analysis of horizontal mergers in product differentiated markets where the resulting price increase is thought to be unilateral - that is, only the post-merger firm increases its prices while other firms in the market do not....

Practically every article that has ever been written about the economic, legal or ethical aspects of acquisitions and mergers has proceeded to discuss the topic from the viewpoint of the initiators, the predators, to use a pejorative term. Very little has been written about the individuals who...