52,160 research outputs found

    The Goals of Antitrust: Welfare Trumps Choice

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    Antitrust Goals in Developing Countries: Policy Alternatives and Normative Choices

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    This Article outlines the different policy alternatives that could guide antitrust enforcement in developing countries. These include efficiency- based goals (allocative, productive, economic, and dynamic efficiency) and non-efficiency-based goals (protecting small businesses; achieving international competitiveness; eradicating poverty; and promoting fairness, equality, and justice). The actual antitrust goals selected by fifty developing countries are then presented. Finally, a proposal is made with regards to what developing countries should aim at achieving with their antitrust law enforcement. This normative take is geared towards realizing dynamic efficiencies or technological progress, coupled with redistribution through antitrust rules, as the accelerators of growth and development. Promoting growth through innovation, as an antitrust objective, corresponds to a desire to incorporate antitrust policy within a broader development agenda that is more suitable to developing countries than static efficiency-based goals

    Does Competition matter? An Attempt of analytical 'Unbundling' of Competition from Consumer Welfare: A Response to Miasik

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    This paper is an attempt to evaluate the conceptual relationship between two central elements of the theory of antitrust: competition and consumer welfare. These two notions are analysed in their mutual dependency. In terms of methodology, the paper proposes to structurally separate competition from consumer welfare. This technique is successfully applied in the domain of legal philosophy when the correlation between law and morality is debated. The main purpose of this paper is to show that both competition and consumer welfare are economic values of fundamental importance with no ex ante hierarchical dominance of consumer welfare over competition. In case of conflict, priority might be given to either of these values depending on the context of the assessment. This paper has a discursive character, it constitutes a response to Dawid Miąsik’s article entitled: ‘Controlled Chaos with Consumer Welfare as the Winner – a Study of the Goals of Polish Antitrust Law’ which was published in the ‘Yearbook of Antitrust and Regulatory Studies’ 2008 vol. 1.goals of competition law; deontological v. utilitarian antitrust; separability thesis; competition and liberal democracy; rule of form v. rule of reason

    Maximum Vertical Price Fixing from \u3cem\u3eAlbrecht\u3c/em\u3e Through \u3cem\u3eBrunswick\u3c/em\u3e to \u3cem\u3eKhan\u3c/em\u3e: An Antitrust Odyssey

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    The article attempts to sort out some of this confusion caused by the legal journey from Albrecht to Khan by portraying that long road as a successful example of the antitrust injury doctrine\u27s ability to bring substantive antitrust law into compliance with the goals of antitrust. First, the article examines how the existence of successive monopoly provides an incentive for maximum vertical price fixing and how maximum vertical price fixing leads to an increase in consumer welfare. Second, it examines manufacturer alternatives to vertical price restraints, finding them less attractive in terms of social welfare. Third, the article analyzes other competitive concerns raised by the Albrecht Court, finding them largely baseless. Fourth, it looks at how the prohibition of maximum vertical price fixing frustrates every one of the suggested goals of antitrust. Finally, the article analyzes the antitrust injury doctrine and shows how its application to maximum resale price fixing forced substantive antitrust law into conformance with the goals of antitrust

    FTC v. \u3cem\u3eQualcomm\u3c/em\u3e and the Need to Reboot Antitrust Goals

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    The antitrust community is facing a demanding question: Is antitrust enforcement ultimately about protecting consumers, competition, or both? This question has sparked debates about the ultimate goals of antitrust law. On one side of the debate, supporters of the consumer welfare standard; and on the other side, supporters of the Neo-Brandeisian standard of enforcement. At this crucial time in the debate of overarching antitrust goals, the Ninth Circuit’s holding in Federal Trade Commission v. Qualcomm Incorporated, one of the most important antitrust cases in the twenty-first century, poses many issues for the consumer welfare standard and antitrust enforcement in the future. Qualcomm Incorporated (“Qualcomm”) is part of a multi-billion-dollar industry as a dominant supplier of baseband processors and a licensor of patents which enable communications in cell phones and tablets. The Federal Trade Commission brought a case against Qualcomm in response to alleged unreasonable restraints on competition and an unlawful maintenance of a monopoly. The Ninth Circuit reversed the district court’s judgment against Qualcomm, and instead found, among other things, that harm to consumers is outside the relevant market in analyzing an antitrust violation. The Ninth Circuit’s exclusion of consumers from an analysis of anticompetitive harm deviates from established precedent and has already caused a ripple effect distancing antitrust enforcement from its established goals and standards. Qualcomm’s business practices in question in this case implicate technology present in the daily lives of most U.S. consumers. In reversing the district court’s holding, the Ninth Circuit misunderstood and misapplied fundamental principles of established antitrust law in reasoning that Qualcomm’s conduct “involves potential harm to customers, not its competitors, and thus falls outside the relevant markets.” This grave error is contrary to fundamental principles of antitrust law and could have significant implications by narrowing the interpretation of the Sherman Act for the foreseeable future. This note addresses the current debate about the ultimate goals of antitrust law, mainly focusing on the Consumer Welfare and the Neo-Brandeisian standards of antitrust enforcement. The lack of clarity and cohesion in antitrust debates about the goals of antitrust have rendered the realm vulnerable to judicial decisions, such as FTC v. Qualcomm, that misapply and misinterpret antitrust standards. This note delineates a potential solution for the lack of clarity as a call to the courts and academics to improve discourse by viewing the protection of consumers and competition as fundamental to antitrust enforcement

    Economics and Politics: Perspectives on the Goals and Future of Antitrust

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    This Article examines the roles of economics and politics in U.S. antitrust from several perspectives. It explains why the modern debate over the economic welfare standard that enforcers and courts should pursue is unsatisfying. It connects economics with politics by describing antitrust’s economic goals as the product of a mid-twentieth century political understanding about the nature of economic regulation that continues to be accepted. To protect that understanding, it explains, antitrust rules should now be implemented using a qualified consumer welfare standard. It identifies contemporary political tensions that threaten to create regulatory gridlock or even to undermine that political understanding and uses that framework to sketch several possible futures for competition policy. Notwithstanding these political tensions, the Article concludes, economics plays an indispensable role in shaping and applying modern antitrust

    Antitrust Law and Economic Analysis: The Swedish Approach

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    Antitrust regimes are mixtures of law, economics and administrative action instituted to protect complex economic processes. Currently in the United States there is widespread confusion and doubt about the goals, values, structures and processes of antitrust law. This Article presents a comparative study of United States and Swedish antitrust law in an attempt to shed some light on the current confusion. Sweden offers a valuable comparison because it utilizes its antitrust law to achieve the same basic goals that are pursued under United States antitrust law, but it does so in a significantly different manner. Swedish antitrust law, in contrast to United States antitrust law, explicitly recognizes the complex interrelationships between legal, administrative and economic analyses in an integrated antitrust system. This Article will first describe and analyze the Swedish antitrust system. The Article will then utilize a comparative perspective to provide insight into the current controversy surrounding United States antitrust law

    Dialectical Antitrust: An Alternative Insight into the Methodology of the EC Competition Law Analysis

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    The main idea behind this article was to perform a theoretical analysis of the purposes and tools of antitrust policy and law. An ancient dialectical method has been applied to separate different components of competition policy with the following deconstruction of the conflicting essence of those elements without inevitable evening-out the distinctions between them. Dialectical approach to antitrust demonstrates why competition deserves to be explored independently from other legitimate economic goals and that the primary purpose of competition law logically is protection (via preventive antitrust, i.e. arts 101-106 TFEU) and promotion (via proactive antitrust, i.e. sector-specific regulation) of competition. Dialectical antitrust does not deny that consumer welfare constitutes a meta-goal of modern competition policy. Indeed in the hierarchy of economic values consumer welfare remains decisive, but methodologically it is neither exhausted nor entirely embraced by competition law, which exists in order to regulate competition. Antitrust theory has striven for a long time to reconcile the apparent dilemma between the aspiration to protect the freedom of undertakings to benefit from their successful competition on one hand, and the freedom of their less successful counterparts to participate in this competition on the other; to provide for firms liberal environment on the one hand and to fine-tune their behaviour in order to establish legal predictability and economic efficiency on the other; to protect competition on the one hand and maximise common benefits for society on the other. Essentially, those three crucial dimensions of the competition dilemma can be solved within the framework of dialectical antitrust, which on the level of methodology proposes to utilitise those conflicts by placing their different components into separate parentheses

    Competition, Consumer Welfare and Monopoly Power

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    An applied general equilibrium analysis of monopoly power is proposed as an alternative to the partial equilibrium analyses of monopoly pricing current in antitrust economics. This analysis introduces a new notion of market equilibrium where firms with monopoly power are cost-minimizing price-takers in competitive factor markets and make supracompetitive profits in equilibrium, i.e., the monopoly price exceeds the marginal cost of production. We assume that the primary goals of antitrust policy are the promotion of competition and the enhancement of consumer welfare. To that end, we use Debreu's coefficient of resource utilization to determine the counterfactual competitive price levels in monopolized markets and then impute the economic costs of monopolization.Monopoly power, Antitrust economics, Applied general equilibrium analysis
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