Owners of standard essential patents (SEPs) are cast as villains for engaging in “patent hold-up,” i.e., taking advantage of the fact that they negotiate royalties with implementer-licensees that already have made sunk investments in the standard. In contrast to “patent ambush,” patent...

In FTC v. Lundbeck, courts rejected a challenge to an acquisition placing under common control the only two drugs for treating a heart defect in newborns. Although the court decisions in the case have been severely criticized, they might well have achieved the right result for the right reason....

Scholarship on competition policy has begun to explore the implications of learning from behavioral research and to challenge the assumption of profit maximization at the heart of neoclassical economic theory of the firm. This scholarship is briefly reviewed, focusing on merger control....

The Weyerhaeuser case presents the scenario of a firm that successfully engages in exclusionary conduct, obtains a monopsony, and yet does not have any potential to injure the end users of its products. Rather, the conduct has the immediate effect of injuring competitors, and the longer-term...

In the April issue of The Antitrust Source, David Scheffman and Joseph Simons identify what they view as a serious flaw in the standard analysis for assessing likely unilateral effects from mergers involving differentiated consumer products. Drawing on marketing literature and psychology, they...

Judges can be too demanding of plaintiffs and thereby stymie meritorious cases, but that is not what happened in FTC v. Qualcomm. The FTC challenged several of Qualcomm’s patent licensing practices and sought to reduce the royalties it collected from makers of cellular devices. But the...

This chapter first reviews the economic theory underlying the unilateral competitive effects of mergers, focusing on the Cournot model, commonly applied to homogeneous products; the Bertrand model, commonly applied to differentiated consumer products; and models of auctions and bargaining,...