This comment responds to the request by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division for public comment on the draft 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. In this comment, we show that there is an inherent loss of an indirect competitor and competition when a...

These recommendations and comments respond to the request by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division for public comment on the draft 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. We commend the agencies for updating the 1984 non-horizontal merger guidelines by...

Among the proposed remedies in the Microsoft case are structural remedies that would create competition in operating systems for personal computers. One criticism that has been raised against such remedies is that they would lead to "fragmentation" of the Windows standard. According to this...

The US District Court in the AT&T/Time Warner vertical merger case has issued its opinion permitting the merger. At of this writing in August 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has appealed to the DC Circuit and filed its brief, as have several Amici. I was disappointed that the DOJ was...

This paper explores cooperation incentives in the absence of public reputation information, using an infinite-horizon Prisoners' Dilemma model of sequential relationships. We examine a strategy which we call Quit-for-Tat (QFT). In this model, individuals initially are paired randomly. In the...

The conservative critique of antitrust law has been highly influential and has facilitated a transformation of antitrust standards of conduct since the 1970s and led to increasingly more permissive standards of conduct. While these changes have taken many forms, all were influenced by the view...

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...

Economists widely agree that, absent sufficient efficiencies or other offsetting factors, mergers that increase concentration substantially are likely to be anticompetitive. Further, holding everything else equal, the magnitude of anticompetitive effects tends to be larger, the larger is the...

One strand of the Neo-Brandeisian critique of traditional antitrust involves the permissive approach to exploitative pricing. Exploitative pricing by powerful firms with durable, but legitimately obtained market power, including non-innovative oligopolists that succeed in coordinating prices...