Private antitrust litigation often involves a dominant firm being accused of exclusionary conduct by a smaller rival. In such cases, the defendant generally has a much larger financial stake in the outcome. We explore the implications of this asymmetry in a model of litigation with endogenous...

The America Invents Act of 2011 (“AIA”) created a robust administrative system—the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”)—for challenging the validity of granted patents. Congress determined that administrative correction of errors made in initial patent grants could be cheaper and...

Patent settlements between rivals restrain competition in many different ways. Antitrust requires that their anticompetitive effects are reasonably commensurate with the firms’ expectations about (counterfactual) patent litigation. Because these expectations are private and non-verifiable,...

We study strategic behavior by private litigants when courts' judgments are "inalienable" in the sense that it is unlawful to contract around them ex post. Inalienable judgments arise in many contexts, including antitrust, labor law, intellectual property, unfair competition, and various types...

We consider strategic behavior in non-Coasean litigation: private disputes such that the court's judgment may influence the final allocation of rights even if transaction costs are zero. This occurs when the law prohibits otherwise-profitable efforts to contract around the court's judgment. This...