The conventional wisdom is that the formation of patent pools is welfare enhancing when patents are complementary, since the pool avoids a double-marginalization problem associated with independent licensing. This conventional wisdom relies on the effects that pooling has on downstream prices....

Consolidation and increased concentration in the agrifood sector over the past two decades, combined with an increased use of alternative marketing agreements in the poultry and livestock industries, have fueled concerns of anti-competitive behavior among large agribusinesses such as the major...

Network effects occur in markets when consumers receive mutual benefits from consuming the same good. Markets with network effects that have generated policy concerns particularly include the information and communications technology (ICT) industries. Many economists and legal scholars argue...

Because standard frequently incorporate patented inventions, standard setting organizations have designed ad hoc policies whereby the owners of such "standard essential patents" must commit ex ante to license them on fair reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to manufacturers of...

It is a long-standing antitrust principle that agency relationships are exempt from price fixing violations. But the agency relationship must be "genuine." To discern genuine agency agreements, the prevailing approach adopted in both the United States and the EU focuses on whether the agent has...

Current controversies over patent policy place standard-setting organizations (SSOs) on a collision course with antitrust law. Recent theoretical research conjectures that, in an SSO, patent owners can “hold up” patent users in the sense of demanding high royalties for a patented input after...

We report a policy experiment that illustrates a potential problem of using historical pass-through rates as a means of predicting the competitive consequences of projected firm-specific cost savings in antitrust contexts, particularly in merger analysis. The effects of cost savings on welfare...

We formalize the phenomenon of disruptive technologies that initially serve isolated market niches and, as they mature, expand to displace established technologies from mainstream segments. Using a model of horizontal and vertical differentiation with discrete customer segmentation, we show how...

The existing literature on mergers in durable goods industries suggests that such mergers will produce much less harm to consumer welfare in the first few years following the merger than mergers in non-durable goods industries, particularly if the pre-merger stock can be kept in service for a...