For competing firms, a patent settlement provides a rare opportunity to write an agreement that forestalls competition without transparently violating the antitrust laws. Problematically, such agreements are highly profitable for reasons that have nothing to do with resolving a patent dispute....

Platforms like Uber, Google Search, and Hulu pervade the modern economic landscape. A platform caters to distinct but deeply-interdependent “sides” of customers that derive value or revenues from one another, such as the merchants and cardholders on a credit card network, or the advertisers...

A tying arrangement is a seller’s requirement that a customer may purchase its “tying” product only by taking its “tied” product. In a variable proportion tie the purchaser can vary the amount of the tied product. For example, a customer might purchase a single printer, but either a...

A price squeeze occurs when a vertically integrated firm "squeezes' a rival's margins between a high wholesale price for an essential input sold to the rival, and a low output price to consumers for whom the two firms compete. Price squeezes have been a recognized but controversial antitrust...

Despite their expertise in patent law, the most litigious patent assertion entities (PAEs) frequently file dubious infringement claims on which they are ostensibly very unlikely to turn a profit. Thus one might conjecture that these PAEs are mistaken to follow through on their litigation threats...

When successive monopolies transact through noncooperative linear pricing, the resulting double markup decreases their joint profits relative to vertical integration. However, if there are downstream rivals (which are not double marginalized), the same noncooperative interaction often...

It is well known in antitrust economics that competitors can rely on patent licensing with supracompetitive royalties as a surrogate for price fixing. This paper addresses a number of alternative situations in which patent royalty agreements may raise antitrust concerns, even if the royalty rate...

A patent "pool" is an arrangement under which patent holders in a common technology commit their patents to a single holder, who then licenses them out to the original patentees and perhaps also to outsiders. The payoffs include both revenue earned as a licensor, and technology acquired by pool...

The current approach for determining when courts should award injunctions in patent disputes involves a myopic focus on the hardships an injunction might impose on the litigants and the public. This article demonstrates, however, that courts sometimes could rely instead on a consideration far...