Judicial Analysis of Predation: The Emerging Trends

This Article examines the recent judicial experience in this endeavor. The purposes of the Article are twofold.The first is to describe the current state of the law regarding predation and to discern significant trends that may be developing. The second purpose is to explore the considerations that courts must weigh in evaluating the legal utility of proposed rules that may be valid as a matter of economic theory. Toward these ends,part II of the Article examines the economic and legal context in which litigants present predation claims. Specifically, this part re-views some of the academic debates that have so greatly influenced recent courtroom developments, the statutory framework within which these developments have occurred, and the legacy of Utah Pie Co. v. Continental Baking Co., which is the Supreme Court\u27s most recent predation decision. Part III then explores the standards that courts are applying in the three principal predation contexts-pricing, innovation, and promotion. Finally, part IV examines certain patterns of judicial analysis that are apparent in fifty-seven cases decided during and after 1975, the year in which Professors Areeda and Turner published their seminal article on predatory pricing. These patterns are important and predictive, for they reflect the courts\u27 views about both the frequency and competitive dangers of predation and the administrative costs of attempting to control it. This examination also includes a table summarizing the outcomes of these cases--who won, in which types of cases, at what procedural stage--and a discussion of some economic and administrative considerations underlying those outcomes.\u27 Overall, the analysis in this Article reveals both the legal trends in one specific area of antitrust law--predation-and, more broadly, the methods by which scholarly and judicial analyses can build upon one another to promote more rapid development of an evolving field of legal inquiry

Elimination of the Conduct Requirement in Government Monopolization Cases

On July 12, 1978, Professor John Flynn of the University of Utah Law School urged the National Commission for the Review of Antitrust Laws and Procedures (National Commission or NCRALP) to consider recommending that Congress amend section 2 of the Sherman Act to permit the government to challenge persistent and substantial monopoly power without showing that the monopoly power was acquired or maintained through objectionable conduct. In Professor Flynn\u27s view, eliminating the prevailing conduct requirement in certain government monopolization cases would expedite litigation and produce more effective remedies, two of the National Commission\u27s central objectives. First, this article explains that a no-conduct standard would lead to faster, more efficient proceedings. Second, the article maintains that eliminating the conduct requirement should produce more effective remedies. In the remainder of the article the authors present in greater detail the reasons underlying these two particular conclusions, and in the process address the key issues highlighted by the National Commission

Fuchsian groups, coverings of Riemann surfaces, subgroup growth, random quotients and random walks

AbstractFuchsian groups (acting as isometries of the hyperbolic plane) occur naturally in geometry, combinatorial group theory, and other contexts. We use character-theoretic and probabilistic methods to study the spaces of homomorphisms from Fuchsian groups to symmetric groups. We obtain a wide variety of applications, ranging from counting branched coverings of Riemann surfaces, to subgroup growth and random finite quotients of Fuchsian groups, as well as random walks on symmetric groups. In particular, we show that, in some sense, almost all homomorphisms from a Fuchsian group to alternating groups An are surjective, and this implies Higman's conjecture that every Fuchsian group surjects onto all large enough alternating groups. As a very special case, we obtain a random Hurwitz generation of An, namely random generation by two elements of orders 2 and 3 whose product has order 7. We also establish the analogue of Higman's conjecture for symmetric groups. We apply these results to branched coverings of Riemann surfaces, showing that under some assumptions on the ramification types, their monodromy group is almost always Sn or An. Another application concerns subgroup growth. We show that a Fuchsian group Γ has (n!)μ+o(1) index n subgroups, where μ is the measure of Γ, and derive similar estimates for so-called Eisenstein numbers of coverings of Riemann surfaces. A final application concerns random walks on alternating and symmetric groups. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a collection of ‘almost homogeneous’ conjugacy classes in An to have product equal to An almost uniformly pointwise. Our methods involve some new asymptotic results for degrees and values of irreducible characters of symmetric groups

Lempel-Ziv Networks

Sequence processing has long been a central area of machine learning research. Recurrent neural nets have been successful in processing sequences for a number of tasks; however, they are known to be both ineffective and computationally expensive when applied to very long sequences. Compression-based methods have demonstrated more robustness when processing such sequences -- in particular, an approach pairing the Lempel-Ziv Jaccard Distance (LZJD) with the k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm has shown promise on long sequence problems (up to $T=200,000,000$ steps) involving malware classification. Unfortunately, use of LZJD is limited to discrete domains. To extend the benefits of LZJD to a continuous domain, we investigate the effectiveness of a deep-learning analog of the algorithm, the Lempel-Ziv Network. While we achieve successful proof of concept, we are unable to improve meaningfully on the performance of a standard LSTM across a variety of datasets and sequence processing tasks. In addition to presenting this negative result, our work highlights the problem of sub-par baseline tuning in newer research areas.Comment: I Can't Believe It's Not Better Workshop at NeurIPS 202

Response to Questions in the First White Paper, \u27Modernizing the Communications Act\u27

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has begun a process to review and update the Communications Act of 1934, last revised in any material way in 1996. As the Committee begins the review process, this paper responds to questions posed by the Committee that all relate, in fundamental ways, to the question: What should a modern Communications Act look like? The Response advocates a clean slate approach under which the regulatory silos that characterize the current statute would be eliminated, along with almost all of the ubiquitous \u27public interest\u27 delegation of authority found throughout the Communications Act. The replacement regime would have at its core a new competition-based standard that, except in limited circumstances, would require that the FCC\u27s regulatory activities be tied to findings of consumer harm resulting from lack of sufficient competition. The FCC\u27s authority to adopt broad anticipatory rules on an ex ante basis would be substantially circumscribed, and the agency would be required to rely more heavily than is presently the case on ex post adjudication of individual complaints alleging specific abuses of market power and consumer harm. Some aspects of the FCC\u27s current jurisdiction, such as privacy and data security regulation, might be transferred to the FTC in light of the FTC\u27s institutional competence in these areas

Response to Questions in the First White Paper, \u27Modernizing the Communications Act\u27

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has begun a process to review and update the Communications Act of 1934, last revised in any material way in 1996. As the Committee begins the review process, this paper responds to questions posed by the Committee that all relate, in fundamental ways, to the question: What should a modern Communications Act look like? The Response advocates a clean slate approach under which the regulatory silos that characterize the current statute would be eliminated, along with almost all of the ubiquitous \u27public interest\u27 delegation of authority found throughout the Communications Act. The replacement regime would have at its core a new competition-based standard that, except in limited circumstances, would require that the FCC\u27s regulatory activities be tied to findings of consumer harm resulting from lack of sufficient competition. The FCC\u27s authority to adopt broad anticipatory rules on an ex ante basis would be substantially circumscribed, and the agency would be required to rely more heavily than is presently the case on ex post adjudication of individual complaints alleging specific abuses of market power and consumer harm. Some aspects of the FCC\u27s current jurisdiction, such as privacy and data security regulation, might be transferred to the FTC in light of the FTC\u27s institutional competence in these areas

Geological Mapping of Fortuna Tessera (V-2): Venus and Earth's Archean Process Comparisons

The geological features, structures, thermal conditions, interpreted processes, and outstanding questions related to both the Earth's Archean and Venus share many similarities and we are using a problem-oriented approach to Venus mapping, guided by insight from the Archean record of the Earth, to gain new insight into the evolution of Venus and Earth's Archean. The Earth's preserved and well-documented Archean record provides important insight into high heat-flux tectonic and magmatic environments and structures and the surface of Venus reveals the current configuration and recent geological record of analogous high-temperature environments unmodified by subsequent several billion years of segmentation and overprinting, as on Earth. Elsewhere we have addressed the nature of the Earth's Archean, the similarities to and differences from Venus, and the specific Venus and Earth-Archean problems on which progress might be made through comparison. Here we present the major goals of the Venus-Archean comparison and show how preliminary mapping of the geology of the V-2 Fortuna Tessera quadrangle is providing insight on these problems. We have identified five key themes and questions common to both the Archean and Venus, the assessment of which could provide important new insights into the history and processes of both planets