The "parallel behavior is enough" standard cannot assist the courts in distinguishing horizontal agreements to restrain trade from normal competition. It would very likely impose significant costs on the economy by distorting competitive incentives and encouraging meritless litigation designed...

The U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) report, Competition and Monopoly: Single-Firm Conduct Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act (“DOJ Report”) is either (1) an extraordinarily useful and well written summary of the legal and economic analyses in the most difficult and contentious area of...

Theories of vertical restraints have shown that vertical practices have the potential to harm competition. Although (or because) they are based on more realistic market structures and account explicitly for strategic interactions among competitions, the predictions of these models are...

Health plans create competition among hospitals by threatening to “steer” patients to preferred facilities. Mergers can reduce this competition and economists have begun using travel cost demand models to predict their effects. In this paper, we document an anomaly in estimation: for any...

A difference estimator of the standard error for the difference in variances of paired time series is proposed. The difference estimator uses the independence of periodogram ordinates to remove nuisance parameters. The difference estimator is easier to compute than one centered on the smoothed...

The legality of nonprice vertical practices in the U.S. is determined by their likely competitive effects. An optimal enforcement rule combines evidence with theory to update prior beliefs, and specifies a decision that minimizes the expected loss. Because the welfare effects of vertical...

The legality of nonprice vertical practices in the U.S. is determined by their likely competitive effects. An optimal enforcement rule combines evidence with theory to update prior beliefs, and specifies a decision that minimizes the expected loss. Because the welfare effects of vertical...

In recent years divergence between United States ("US") and European Union ("EU") competition policy has garnered a lot of attention. One particular area where these differences are evident is the treatment of vertical restraints. In the USA, an antitrust plaintiff must show that a vertical...

In this paper, we examine price movements over time around the collapse of a bid-rigging conspiracy. While the mean decreased by sixteen percent, the standard deviation increased by over two hundred percent. We hypothesize that conspiracies in other industries would exhibit similar...