When I first heard that Josh had resigned from the FTC, I wondered if the news would cause a stock market sell-off. I checked later that day, and the Dow closed slightly up, plus .39 percent.

This suggests several possible explanations. One is that the stock market had already priced in Josh’s departure. Another is that the stock market realizes that Josh was just one of five votes, and that his replacement would cast votes similar to Josh’s. A third possible explanation is that the FTC doesn’t really have a great impact on the economy.

Read the full piece here.

Josh Wright is a tour de force. He has broken the mold for a Washington regulator — and created a new one. As a scholar, he carefully crafts his analyses of public policy. As a strategic thinker, he tackles the issues that redound to the greatest social benefit. And as a champion of competitive markets, he forcefully advances rules to encourage innovation and consumer welfare. Nearly as important as his diligence within the regulatory process, he is transparent in his objectives and takes every opportunity to enunciate his principles for action. The public knows what he is doing and why it is important. 

Read the full piece here.

by Jonathan Jacobson, partner & Ryan Maddock, associate, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Excluding the much talked about Section 5 policy statement, Commissioner Wright’s tenure at the FTC was highlighted by his numerous dissents. If there is one unifying theme in those dissents it is his insistence that rigorous economic analysis be at the very core of all the Commission’s decisions. This theme was perhaps most evident in his decision to dissent in the Ardaugh/Saint-Gobain and Sysco/US Foods mergers, two cases that presented interesting questions about how the Commission and courts should balance a merger’s likely anticompetitive effects with its procompetitive efficiencies.

In April of 2014 the Commission announced that it had accepted a consent decree in Ardaugh/Saint-Gobain that remedied its competitive concerns related to the merger of the second and third largest firms in the market for “glass containers sold to beer and wine distributors in the United States.” The majority, which consisted of Commissioners Ramirez, Ohlhausen, and Brill, argued that the merger would lead to both coordinated and unilateral anticompetitive effects in the market and further stated that “the parties put forward insufficient evidence showing that the level of synergies that could be substantiated and verified would outweigh the clear evidence of consumer harm.” Commissioner Wright, who was the lone dissenter, strongly disagreed with the majority’s conclusions and found that the merger’s cognizable efficiencies were “up to six times greater than any likely unilateral price effect,” and thus the merger should have been approved without requiring a remedy.

Commissioner Wright also used his Ardaugh dissent to discuss whether the merging parties and Commission face asymmetric burdens of proof regarding competitive effects. Specifically, Commissioner Wright asked whether the “merging parties [must] overcome a greater burden of proof on efficiencies in practice than does the FTC to satisfy its prima facie burden of establishing anticompetitive effects?” Commissioner Wright stated that the Commission has acknowledged that in theory the burdens of proof should be uniform; however, he argued that the only way the majority could have found that the Ardaugh/Saint-Gobain merger would generate almost no cognizable efficiencies is by applying asymmetric burdens. He explained that the majority’s approach “embraces probabilistic prediction, estimation, presumption, and simulation of anticompetitive effects on the one hand but requires efficiencies to be proven on the other.”

Commissioner Wright, who was joined by Commissioner Ohlhausen, also dissented from the Commission’s decision to challenge the Sysco/US Foods merger. While the Commissioners did not issue a formal dissent because of the FTC’s then pending litigation, Commissioner Wright tweeted that he had “no reason to believe the proposed Sysco/US Foods transaction violated the Clayton Act.” The lack of a formal dissent makes it challenging to ascertain all of Commissioner Wright’s objections, but a reading of the Commission’s administrative complaint provides insight on his likely positions. For example, Commissioner Wright undoubtedly disagreed with the complaint’s treatment the parties’ proffered efficiencies:

Extraordinary Merger-specific efficiencies are necessary to outweigh the Merger’s likely significant harm to competition in the relevant markets. Respondents cannot demonstrate cognizable efficiencies that would be sufficient to rebut the strong presumption and evidence that the Merger likely would substantially lessen competition in the relevant markets.

Commissioner Wright’s Ardaugh dissent makes it clear that he does not believe that the balancing of anticompetitive effects and efficiencies should be an afterthought to the agency’s merger analysis, which is how the majority’s complaint appears to treat it. This case likely represents another instance where Commissioner Wright believed that the majority of commissioners applied asymmetric burdens of proof when balancing the merger’s competitive effects.

Commissioner Wright is not the first person to ask whether current merger analysis favors anticompetitive effects over efficiencies; however, that does not detract from the question’s importance.  His views reflect a belief shared by others that antitrust policy should be based on an aggregate welfare standard, rather than the consumer welfare standard that the agencies and the courts have for the most applied over the past few decades. In Commissioner Wright’s view, by applying asymmetric burdens–which is functionally the same as discounting efficiencies–antitrust agencies could harm both total welfare and consumers by increasing the chance that a procompetitive merger might be blocked. It stands in contrast to the majority view that a merger that raises prices requires efficiencies, specific to the merger, of a magnitude sufficient to defeat any increase in consumer prices–and that, because the efficiency information is in the hands of the proponents, shifting the burden to them is appropriate.

While his tenure at the FTC has come to an end, expect to continue to see Commissioner Wright at the front and center of this and many other important antitrust issues.

Tomorrow (August 24, 2015) marks once and future TOTM’er Josh Wright’s last day as an FTC Commissioner. Starting tomorrow and continuing throughout the week, Truth on the Market will be hosting a symposium —  a collection of commentaries and contributions — honoring Josh’s tenure at the FTC. We’ve invited contributions from a range of luminaries, including academics, practitioners, former FTC officials, and the like. Watch this space for the contributions, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments to the posts. Links to the posts will be collected here.

Monday’s posts will commence with contributions from

• Richard Epstein,
• Jon Jacobson,
• Tom Hazlett, and
• Keith Hylton

— with many more to come!

Filed under: administrative, federal trade commission, JDW Symposium, truth on the market Tagged: Federal Trade Commission, ftc, joshua wright, Symposium

Today, for the first time in its 100-year history, the FTC issued enforcement guidelines for cases brought by the agency under the Unfair Methods of Competition (“UMC”) provisions of Section 5 of the FTC Act.

The Statement of Enforcement Principles represents a significant victory for Commissioner Joshua Wright, who has been a tireless advocate for defining and limiting the scope of the Commission’s UMC authority since before his appointment to the FTC in 2013.

As we’ve noted many times before here at TOTM (including in our UMC Guidelines Blog Symposium), FTC enforcement principles for UMC actions have been in desperate need of clarification. Without any UMC standards, the FTC has been free to leverage its costly adjudication process into settlements (or short-term victories) and businesses have been left in the dark as to what what sorts of conduct might trigger enforcement. Through a series of unadjudicated settlements, UMC unfairness doctrine (such as it is) has remained largely within the province of FTC discretion and without judicial oversight. As a result, and either by design or by accident, UMC never developed a body of law encompassing well-defined goals or principles like antitrust’s consumer welfare standard.

Commissioner Wright has long been at the forefront of the battle to rein in the FTC’s discretion in this area and to promote the rule of law. Soon after joining the Commission, he called for Section 5 guidelines that would constrain UMC enforcement to further consumer welfare, tied to the economically informed analysis of competitive effects developed in antitrust law.

Today’s UMC Statement embodies the essential elements of Commissioner Wright’s proposal. Under the new guidelines:

1. The Commission will make UMC enforcement decisions based on traditional antitrust principles, including the consumer welfare standard;
2. Only conduct that would violate the antitrust rule of reason will give rise to enforcement, and the Commission will not bring UMC cases without evidence demonstrating that harm to competition outweighs any efficiency or business justifications for the conduct at issue; and
3. The Commission commits to the principle that it is more appropriate to bring cases under the antitrust laws than under Section 5 when the conduct at issue could give rise to a cause of action under the antitrust laws. Notably, this doesn’t mean that the agency gets to use UMC when it thinks it might lose under the Sherman or Clayton Acts; rather, it means UMC is meant only to be a gap-filler, to be used when the antitrust statutes don’t apply at all.

Yes, the Statement is a compromise. For instance, there is no safe harbor from UMC enforcement if any cognizable efficiencies are demonstrated, as Commissioner Wright initially proposed.

But by enshrining antitrust law’s consumer welfare standard in future UMC caselaw, by obligating the Commission to assess conduct within the framework of the well-established antitrust rule of reason, and by prioritizing antitrust over UMC when both might apply, the Statement brings UMC law into the world of modern antitrust analysis. This is a huge achievement.

It’s also a huge achievement that a Statement like this one would be introduced by Chairwoman Ramirez. As recently as last year, Ramirez had resisted efforts to impose constraints on the FTC’s UMC enforcement discretion. In a 2014 speech Ramirez said:

I have expressed concern about recent proposals to formulate guidance to try to codify our unfair methods principles for the first time in the Commission’s 100 year history. While I don’t object to guidance in theory, I am less interested in prescribing our future enforcement actions than in describing our broad enforcement principles revealed in our recent precedent.

The “recent precedent” that Ramirez referred to is precisely the set of cases applying UMC to reach antitrust-relevant conduct that led to Commissioner Wright’s efforts. The common law of consent decrees that make up the precedent Ramirez refers to, of course, are not legally binding and provide little more than regurgitated causes of action.

But today, under Congressional pressure and pressure from within the agency led by Commissioner Wright, Chairwoman Ramirez and the other two Democratic commissioners voted for the Statement.

Competitive Effects Analysis Under the Statement

As Commissioner Ohlhausen argues in her dissenting statement, the UMC Statement doesn’t remove all enforcement discretion from the Commission — after all, enforcement principles, like standards in law generally, have fuzzy boundaries.

But what Commissioner Ohlhausen seems to miss is that, by invoking antitrust principles, the rule of reason and competitive effects analysis, the Statement incorporates by reference 125 years of antitrust law and economics. The Statement itself need not go into excessive detail when, with only a few words, it brings modern antitrust jurisprudence embodied in cases like Trinko, Leegin, and Brooke Group into UMC law.

Under the new rule of reason approach for UMC, the FTC will condemn conduct only when it causes or is likely to cause “harm to competition or the competitive process, taking into account any associated cognizable efficiencies and business justifications.” In other words, the evidence must demonstrate net harm to consumers before the FTC can take action. That’s a significant constraint.

As noted above, Commissioner Wright originally proposed a safe harbor from FTC UMC enforcement whenever cognizable efficiencies are present. The Statement’s balancing test is thus a compromise. But it’s not really a big move from Commissioner Wright’s initial position.

Commissioner Wright’s original proposal tied the safe harbor to “cognizable” efficiencies, which is an exacting standard. As Commissioner Wright noted in his Blog Symposium post on the subject:

[T]he efficiencies screen I offer intentionally leverages the Commission’s considerable expertise in identifying the presence of cognizable efficiencies in the merger context and explicitly ties the analysis to the well-developed framework offered in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines. As any antitrust practitioner can attest, the Commission does not credit “cognizable efficiencies” lightly and requires a rigorous showing that the claimed efficiencies are merger-specific, verifiable, and not derived from an anticompetitive reduction in output or service. Fears that the efficiencies screen in the Section 5 context would immunize patently anticompetitive conduct because a firm nakedly asserts cost savings arising from the conduct without evidence supporting its claim are unwarranted. Under this strict standard, the FTC would almost certainly have no trouble demonstrating no cognizable efficiencies exist in Dan’s “blowing up of the competitor’s factory” example because the very act of sabotage amounts to an anticompetitive reduction in output.

The difference between the safe harbor approach and the balancing approach embodied in the Statement is largely a function of administrative economy. Before, the proposal would have caused the FTC to err on the side of false negatives, possibly forbearing from bringing some number of welfare-enhancing cases in exchange for a more certain reduction in false positives. Now, there is greater chance of false positives.

But the real effect is that more cases will be litigated because, in the end, both versions would require some degree of antitrust-like competitive effects analysis. Under the Statement, if procompetitive efficiencies outweigh anticompetitive harms, the defendant still wins (and the FTC is to avoid enforcement). Under the original proposal fewer actions might be brought, but those that are brought would surely settle. So one likely outcome of choosing a balancing test over the safe harbor is that more close cases will go to court to be sorted out. Whether this is a net improvement over the safe harbor depends on whether the social costs of increased litigation and error are offset by a reduction in false negatives — as well as the more robust development of the public good of legal case law.  

Reduced FTC Discretion Under the Statement

The other important benefit of the Statement is that it commits the FTC to a regime that reduces its discretion.

Chairwoman Ramirez and former Chairman Leibowitz — among others — have embraced a broader role for Section 5, particularly in order to avoid the judicial limits on antitrust actions arising out of recent Supreme Court cases like Trinko, Leegin, Brooke Group, Linkline, Weyerhaeuser and Credit Suisse.

For instance, as former Chairman Leibowitz said in 2008:

[T]he Commission should not be tied to the more technical definitions of consumer harm that limit applications of the Sherman Act when we are looking at pure Section 5 violations.

And this was no idle threat. Recent FTC cases, including Intel, N-Data, Google (Motorola), and Bosch, could all have been brought under the Sherman Act, but were brought — and settled — as Section 5 cases instead. Under the new Statement, all four would likely be Sherman Act cases.

There’s little doubt that, left unfettered, Section 5 UMC actions would only have grown in scope. Former Chairman Leibowitz, in his concurring opinion in Rambus, described UMC as

a flexible and powerful Congressional mandate to protect competition from unreasonable restraints, whether long-since recognized or newly discovered, that violate the antitrust laws, constitute incipient violations of those laws, or contravene those laws’ fundamental policies.

Both Leibowitz and former Commissioner Tom Rosch (again, among others) often repeated their views that Section 5 permitted much the same actions as were available under Section 2 — but without the annoyance of those pesky, economically sensible, judicial limitations. (Although, in fairness, Leibowitz also once commented that it would not “be wise to use the broader [Section 5] authority whenever we think we can’t win an antitrust case, as a sort of ‘fallback.’”)

In fact, there is a long and unfortunate trend of FTC commissioners and other officials asserting some sort of “public enforcement exception” to the judicial limits on Sherman Act cases. As then Deputy Director for Antitrust in the Bureau of Economics, Howard Shelanski, told Congress in 2010:

The Commission believes that its authority to prevent “unfair methods of competition” through Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act enables the agency to pursue conduct that it cannot reach under the Sherman Act, and thus avoid the potential strictures of Trinko.

In this instance, and from the context (followed as it is by a request for Congress to actually exempt the agency from Trinko and Credit Suisse!), it seems that “reach” means “win.”

Still others have gone even further. Tom Rosch, for example, has suggested that the FTC should challenge Patent Assertion Entities under Section 5 merely because “we have a gut feeling” that the conduct violates the Act and it may not be actionable under Section 2.

Even more egregious, Steve Salop and Jon Baker advocate using Section 5 to implement their preferred social policies — in this case to reduce income inequality. Such expansionist views, as Joe Sims recently reminded TOTM readers, hearken back to the troubled FTC of the 1970s:  

Remember [former FTC Chairman] Mike Pertschuck saying that Section 5 could possibly be used to enforce compliance with desirable energy policies or environmental requirements, or to attack actions that, in the opinion of the FTC majority, impeded desirable employment programs or were inconsistent with the nation’s “democratic, political and social ideals.” The two speeches he delivered on this subject in 1977 were the beginning of the end for increased Section 5 enforcement in that era, since virtually everyone who heard or read them said:  “Whoa! Is this really what we want the FTC to be doing?”

Apparently, for some, it is — even today. But don’t forget: This was the era in which Congress actually briefly shuttered the FTC for refusing to recognize limits on its discretion, as Howard Beales reminds us:

The breadth, overreaching, and lack of focus in the FTC’s ambitious rulemaking agenda outraged many in business, Congress, and the media. Even the Washington Post editorialized that the FTC had become the “National Nanny.” Most significantly, these concerns reverberated in Congress. At one point, Congress refused to provide the necessary funding, and simply shut down the FTC for several days…. So great were the concerns that Congress did not reauthorize the FTC for fourteen years. Thus chastened, the Commission abandoned most of its rulemaking initiatives, and began to re-examine unfairness to develop a focused, injury-based test to evaluate practices that were allegedly unfair.

A truly significant effect of the Policy Statement will be to neutralize the effort to use UMC to make an end-run around antitrust jurisprudence in order to pursue non-economic goals. It will now be a necessary condition of a UMC enforcement action to prove a contravention of fundamental antitrust policies (i.e., consumer welfare), rather than whatever three commissioners happen to agree is a desirable goal. And the Statement puts the brakes on efforts to pursue antitrust cases under Section 5 by expressing a clear policy preference at the FTC to bring such cases under the antitrust laws.

Commissioner Ohlhausen’s objects that

the fact that this policy statement requires some harm to competition does little to constrain the Commission, as every Section 5 theory pursued in the last 45 years, no matter how controversial or convoluted, can be and has been couched in terms of protecting competition and/or consumers.

That may be true, but the same could be said of every Section 2 case, as well. Commissioner Ohlhausen seems to be dismissing the fact that the Statement effectively incorporates by reference the last 45 years of antitrust law, too. Nothing will incentivize enforcement targets to challenge the FTC in court — or incentivize the FTC itself to forbear from enforcement — like the ability to argue Trinko, Leegin and their ilk. Antitrust law isn’t perfect, of course, but making UMC law coextensive with modern antitrust law is about as much as we could ever reasonably hope for. And the Statement basically just gave UMC defendants blanket license to add a string of “See Areeda & Hovenkamp” cites to every case the FTC brings. We should count that as a huge win.

Commissioner Ohlhausen also laments the brevity and purported vagueness of the Statement, claiming that

No interpretation of the policy statement by a single Commissioner, no matter how thoughtful, will bind this or any future Commission to greater limits on Section 5 UMC enforcement than what is in this exceedingly brief, highly general statement.

But, in the end, it isn’t necessarily the Commissioners’ self-restraint upon which the Statement relies; it’s the courts’ (and defendants’) ability to take the obvious implications of the Statement seriously and read current antitrust precedent into future UMC cases. If every future UMC case is adjudicated like a Sherman or Clayton Act case, the Statement will have been a resounding success.

Arguably no FTC commissioner has been as successful in influencing FTC policy as a minority commissioner — over sustained opposition, and in a way that constrains the agency so significantly — as has Commissioner Wright today.

Filed under: antitrust, Efficiencies, error costs, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, federal trade commission, ftc, law and economics, monopolization, resale price maintenance, section 5, settlements, UMC symposium Tagged: antitrust law, Commissioner Wright, Edith Ramirez, Federal Trade Commission, ftc, guidelines, joshua wright, Maureen Ohlhausen, section 5, UMC, unfair methods of competition

FTC Commissioner Josh Wright has some wise thoughts on how to handle a small GUPPI. I don’t mean the fish. Dissenting in part in the Commission’s disposition of the Family Dollar/Dollar Tree merger, Commissioner Wright calls for creating a safe harbor for mergers where the competitive concern is unilateral effects and the merger generates a low score on the “Gross Upward Pricing Pressure Index,” or “GUPPI.”

Before explaining why Wright is right on this one, some quick background on the GUPPI. In 2010, the DOJ and FTC revised their Horizontal Merger Guidelines to reflect better the actual practices the agencies follow in conducting pre-merger investigations. Perhaps the most notable new emphasis in the revised guidelines was a move away from market definition, the traditional starting point for merger analysis, and toward consideration of potentially adverse “unilateral” effects—i.e., anticompetitive harms that, unlike collusion or even non-collusive oligopolistic pricing, need not involve participation of any non-merging firms in the market. The primary unilateral effect emphasized by the new guidelines is that the merger may put “upward pricing pressure” on brand-differentiated but otherwise similar products sold by the merging firms. The guidelines maintain that when upward pricing pressure seems significant, it may be unnecessary to define the relevant market before concluding that an anticompetitive effect is likely.

The logic of upward pricing pressure is straightforward. Suppose five firms sell competing products (Products A-E) that, while largely substitutable, are differentiated by brand. Given the brand differentiation, some of the products are closer substitutes than others. If the closest substitute to Product A is Product B and vice-versa, then a merger between Producer A and Producer B may result in higher prices even if the remaining producers (C, D, and E) neither raise their prices nor reduce their output. The merged firm will know that if it raises the price of Product A, most of the lost sales will be diverted to Product B, which that firm also produces. Similarly, sales diverted from Product B will largely flow to Product A. Thus, the merged company, seeking to maximize its profits, may face pressure to raise the prices of Products A and/or B.

The GUPPI seeks to assess the likelihood, absent countervailing efficiencies, that the merged firm (e.g., Producer A combined with Producer B) would raise the price of one of its competing products (e.g., Product A), causing some of the lost sales on that product to be diverted to its substitute (e.g., Product B). The GUPPI on Product A would thus consist of:

The Value of Sales Diverted to Product B
Foregone Revenues on Lost Product A Sales.

The value of sales diverted to Product B, the numerator, is equal to the number of units diverted from Product A to Product B times the profit margin (price minus marginal cost) on Product B. The foregone revenues on lost Product A sales, the denominator, is equal to the number of lost Product A sales times the price of Product A. Thus, the fraction set forth above is equal to:

Number of A Sales Diverted to B * Unit Margin on B
Number of A Sales Lost * Price of A.

The Guidelines do not specify how high the GUPPI for a particular product must be before competitive concerns are raised, but they do suggest that at some point, the GUPPI is so small that adverse unilateral effects are unlikely. (“If the value of diverted sales is proportionately small, significant unilateral price effects are unlikely.”) Consistent with this observation, DOJ’s Antitrust Division has concluded that a GUPPI of less than 5% will not give rise to a merger challenge.

Commissioner Wright has split with his fellow commissioners over whether the FTC should similarly adopt a safe harbor for horizontal mergers where the adverse competitive concern is unilateral effects and the GUPPIs are less than 5%. Of the 330 markets in which the Commission is requiring divestiture of stores, 27 involve GUPPIs of less than 5%. Commissioner Wright’s position is that the combinations in those markets should be deemed to fall within a safe harbor. At the very least, he says, there should be some safe harbor for very small GUPPIs, even if it kicks in somewhere below the 5% level. The Commission has taken the position that there should be no safe harbor for mergers where the competitive concern is unilateral effects, no matter how low the GUPPI. Instead, the Commission majority says, GUPPI is just a starting point; once the GUPPIs are calculated, each market should be assessed in light of qualitative factors, and a gestalt-like, “all things considered” determination should be made.

The Commission majority purports to have taken this approach in the Family Dollar/Dollar Tree case. It claims that having used GUPPI to identify some markets that were presumptively troubling (markets where GUPPIs were above a certain level) and others that were presumptively not troubling (low-GUPPI markets), it went back and considered qualitative evidence for each, allowing the presumption to be rebutted where appropriate. As Commissioner Wright observes, though, the actual outcome of this purported process is curious: almost none of the “presumptively anticompetitive” markets were cleared based on qualitative evidence, whereas 27 of the “presumptively competitive” markets were slated for a divestiture despite the low GUPPI. In practice, the Commission seems to be using high GUPPIs to condemn unilateral effects mergers, while not allowing low GUPPIs to acquit them. Wright, by contrast, contends that a low-enough GUPPI should be sufficient to acquit a merger where the only plausible competitive concern is adverse unilateral effects.

He’s right on this, for at least five reasons.

1. Virtually every merger involves a positive GUPPI. As long as any sales would be diverted from one merging firm to the other and the firms are pricing above cost (so that there is some profit margin on their products), a merger will involve a positive GUPPI. (Recall that the numerator in the GUPPI is “number of diverted sales * profit margin on the product to which sales are diverted.”) If qualitative evidence must be considered and a gestalt-like decision made in even low-GUPPI cases, then that’s the approach that will always be taken and GUPPI data will be essentially irrelevant.
2. Calculating GUPPIs is hard. Figuring the GUPPI requires the agencies to make some difficult determinations. Calculating the “diversion ratio” (the percentage of lost A sales that are diverted to B when the price of A is raised) requires determinations of A’s “own-price elasticity of demand” as well as the “cross-price elasticity of demand” between A and B. Calculating the profit margin on B requires determining B’s marginal cost. Assessing elasticity of demand and marginal cost is notoriously difficult. This difficulty matters here for a couple of reasons:
   • First, why go through the difficult task of calculating GUPPIs if they won’t simplify the process of evaluating a merger? Under the Commission’s purported approach, once GUPPI is calculated, enforcers still have to consider all the other evidence and make an “all things considered” judgment. A better approach would be to cut off the additional analysis if the GUPPI is sufficiently small.
   • Second, given the difficulty of assessing marginal cost (which is necessary to determine the profit margin on the product to which sales are diverted), enforcers are likely to use a proxy, and the most commonly used proxy for marginal cost is average variable cost (i.e., the total non-fixed costs of producing the products at issue divided by the number of units produced). Average variable cost, though, tends to be smaller than marginal cost over the relevant range of output, which will cause the profit margin (price – “marginal” cost) on the product to which sales are diverted to appear higher than it actually is. And that will tend to overstate the GUPPI. Thus, at some point, a positive but low GUPPI should be deemed insignificant.
3. The GUPPI is biased toward an indication of anticompetitive effect. GUPPI attempts to assess gross upward pricing pressure. It takes no account of factors that tend to prevent prices from rising. In particular, it ignores entry and repositioning by other product-differentiated firms, factors that constrain the merged firm’s ability to raise prices. It also ignores merger-induced efficiencies, which tend to put downward pressure on the merged firm’s prices. (Granted, the merger guidelines call for these factors to be considered eventually, but the factors are generally subject to higher proof standards. Efficiencies, in particular, are pretty difficulty to establish under the guidelines.) The upshot is that the GUPPI is inherently biased toward an indication of anticompetitive harm. A safe harbor for mergers involving low GUPPIs would help counter-balance this built-in bias.
4. Divergence from DOJ’s approach will create an arbitrary result. The FTC and DOJ’s Antitrust Division share responsibility for assessing proposed mergers. Having the two enforcement agencies use different standards in their evaluations injects a measure of arbitrariness into the law. In the interest of consistency, predictability, and other basic rule of law values, the agencies should get on the same page. (And, for reasons set forth above, DOJ’s is the better one.)
5. A safe harbor is consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision-theoretic antitrust jurisprudence. In recent years, the Supreme Court has generally crafted antitrust rules to optimize the costs of errors and of making liability judgments (or, put differently, to “minimize the sum of error and decision costs”). On a number of occasions, the Court has explicitly observed that it is better to adopt a rule that will allow the occasional false acquittal if doing so will prevent greater costs from false convictions and administration. The Brooke Group rule that there can be no predatory pricing liability absent below-cost pricing, for example, is expressly not premised on the belief that low, but above-cost, pricing can never be anticompetitive; rather, the rule is justified on the ground that the false negatives it allows are less costly than the false positives and administrative difficulties a more “theoretically perfect” rule would generate. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s antitrust jurisprudence seems to have wholeheartedly endorsed Voltaire’s prudent aphorism, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” It is thus no answer for the Commission to observe that adverse unilateral effects can sometimes occur when a combination involves a low (<5%) GUPPI. Low but above-cost pricing can sometimes be anticompetitive, but Brooke Group’s safe harbor is sensible and representative of the approach the Supreme Court thinks antitrust should take. The FTC should get on board.

One final point. It is important to note that Commissioner Wright is not saying—and would be wrong to say—that a high GUPPI should be sufficient to condemn a merger. The GUPPI has never been empirically verified as a means of identifying anticompetitive mergers. As Dennis Carlton observed, “[T]he use of UPP as a merger screen is untested; to my knowledge, there has been no empirical analysis that has been performed to validate its predictive value in assessing the competitive effects of mergers.” Dennis W. Carlton, Revising the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, 10 J. Competition L. & Econ. 1, 24 (2010). This dearth of empirical evidence seems especially problematic in light of the enforcement agencies’ spotty track record in predicting the effects of mergers. Craig Peters, for example, found that the agencies’ merger simulations produced wildly inaccurate predictions about the price effects of airline mergers. See Craig Peters, Evaluating the Performance of Merger Simulation: Evidence from the U.S. Airline Industry, 49 J.L. & Econ. 627 (2006). Professor Carlton thus warns (Carlton, supra, at 32):

UPP is effectively a simplified version of merger simulation. As such, Peters’s findings tell a cautionary tale—more such studies should be conducted before one treats UPP, or any other potential merger review method, as a consistently reliable methodology by which to identify anticompetitive mergers.

The Commission majority claims to agree that a high GUPPI alone should be insufficient to condemn a merger. But the actual outcome of the analysis in the case at hand—i.e., finding almost all combinations involving high GUPPIs to be anticompetitive, while deeming the procompetitive presumption to be rebutted in 27 low-GUPPI cases—suggests that the Commission is really allowing high GUPPIs to “prove” that anticompetitive harm is likely.

The point of dispute between Wright and the other commissioners, though, is about how to handle low GUPPIs. On that question, the Commission should either join the DOJ in recognizing a safe harbor for low-GUPPI mergers or play it straight with the public and delete the Horizontal Merger Guidelines’ observation that “[i]f the value of diverted sales is proportionately small, significant unilateral price effects are unlikely.” The better approach would be to affirm the Guidelines and recognize a safe harbor.

Filed under: antitrust, federal trade commission, ftc, merger guidelines

On Thursday I will be participating in an ABA panel discussion on the Apple e-books case, along with Mark Ryan (former DOJ attorney) and Fiona Scott-Morton (former DOJ economist), both of whom were key members of the DOJ team that brought the case. Details are below. Judging from the prep call, it should be a spirited discussion!

Readers looking for background on the case (as well as my own views — decidedly in opposition to those of the DOJ) can find my previous commentary on the case and some of the issues involved here:

• Why I think the Apple e-books antitrust decision will (or at least should) be overturned
• Why I think the government will have a tough time winning the Apple e-books antitrust case
• The procompetitive story that could undermine the DOJ’s e-books antitrust case against Apple
• How Apple can defeat the DOJ’s e-book antitrust suit
• The US e-books case against Apple: The procompetitive story (in a special issue of Concurrences on “E-books and the boundaries of antitrust” that includes several other essays worth reading)
• Amazon vs. Macmillan: It’s all about control

Other TOTM authors have also weighed in. See, e.g.:

• Alden Abbott: The Second Circuit Misapplies the Per Se Rule in U.S. v. Apple
• Josh Wright: The Apple E-Book Kerfuffle Meets Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics
• Josh Wright: Apple and Amazon E-Book Most Favored Nation Clauses

DETAILS:

ABA Section of Antitrust Law

Federal Civil Enforcement Committee, Joint Conduct, Unilateral Conduct, and Media & Tech Committees Present:

“The 2d Cir.’s Apple E-Books decision: Debating the merits and the meaning”

July 16, 2015
12:00 noon to 1:30 pm Eastern / 9:00 am to 10:30 am Pacific

On June 30, the Second Circuit affirmed DOJ’s trial victory over Apple in the Ebooks Case. The three-judge panel fractured in an interesting way: two judges affirmed the finding that Apple’s role in a “hub and spokes” conspiracy was unlawful per se; one judge also would have found a rule-of-reason violation; and the dissent — stating Apple had a “vertical” position and was challenging the leading seller’s “monopoly” — would have found no liability at all. What is the reasoning and precedent of the decision? Is “marketplace vigilantism” (the concurring judge’s phrase) ever justified? Our panel — which includes the former DOJ head of litigation involved in the case — will debate the issues.

Moderator

• Ken Ewing, Steptoe & Johnson LLP

Panelists

• Geoff Manne, International Center for Law & Economics
• Fiona Scott Morton, Yale School of Management
• Mark Ryan, Mayer Brown LLP

Register HERE

Filed under: administrative, antitrust, cartels, contracts, doj, e-books, economics, Efficiencies, error costs, law and economics, litigation, market definition, MFNs, monopolization, resale price maintenance, technology, vertical restraints Tagged: agency model, Amazon, antitrust, Apple, doj, e-books, iBookstore, major publishers, MFN, most favored nations clause, per se, price-fixing, publishing industry, Rule of reason, vertical restraints

The FTC recently required divestitures in two merger investigations (here and here), based largely on the majority’s conclusion that

[when] a proposed merger significantly increases concentration in an already highly concentrated market, a presumption of competitive harm is justified under both the Guidelines and well-established case law.” (Emphasis added).

Commissioner Wright dissented in both matters (here and here), contending that

[the majority’s] reliance upon such shorthand structural presumptions untethered from empirical evidence subsidize a shift away from the more rigorous and reliable economic tools embraced by the Merger Guidelines in favor of convenient but obsolete and less reliable economic analysis.

Josh has the better argument, of course. In both cases the majority relied upon its structural presumption rather than actual economic evidence to make out its case. But as Josh notes in his dissent in In the Matter of ZF Friedrichshafen and TRW Automotive (quoting his 2013 dissent in In the Matter of Fidelity National Financial, Inc. and Lender Processing Services):

there is no basis in modern economics to conclude with any modicum of reliability that increased concentration—without more—will increase post-merger incentives to coordinate. Thus, the Merger Guidelines require the federal antitrust agencies to develop additional evidence that supports the theory of coordination and, in particular, an inference that the merger increases incentives to coordinate.

Or as he points out in his dissent in In the Matter of Holcim Ltd. and Lafarge S.A.

The unifying theme of the unilateral effects analysis contemplated by the Merger Guidelines is that a particularized showing that post-merger competitive constraints are weakened or eliminated by the merger is superior to relying solely upon inferences of competitive effects drawn from changes in market structure.

It is unobjectionable (and uninteresting) that increased concentration may, all else equal, make coordination easier, or enhance unilateral effects in the case of merger to monopoly. There are even cases (as in generic pharmaceutical markets) where rigorous, targeted research exists, sufficient to support a presumption that a reduction in the number of firms would likely lessen competition. But generally (as in these cases), absent actual evidence, market shares might be helpful as an initial screen (and may suggest greater need for a thorough investigation), but they are not analytically probative in themselves. As Josh notes in his TRW dissent:

The relevant question is not whether the number of firms matters but how much it matters.

The majority in these cases asserts that it did find evidence sufficient to support its conclusions, but — and this is where the rubber meets the road — the question remains whether its limited evidentiary claims are sufficient, particularly given analyses that repeatedly come back to the structural presumption. As Josh says in his Holcim dissent:

it is my view that the investigation failed to adduce particularized evidence to elevate the anticipated likelihood of competitive effects from “possible” to “likely” under any of these theories. Without this necessary evidence, the only remaining factual basis upon which the Commission rests its decision is the fact that the merger will reduce the number of competitors from four to three or three to two. This is simply not enough evidence to support a reason to believe the proposed transaction will violate the Clayton Act in these Relevant Markets.

Looking at the majority’s statements, I see a few references to the kinds of market characteristics that could indicate competitive concerns — but very little actual analysis of whether these characteristics are sufficient to meet the Clayton Act standard in these particular markets. The question is — how much analysis is enough? I agree with Josh that the answer must be “more than is offered here,” but it’s an important question to explore more deeply.

Presumably that’s exactly what the ABA’s upcoming program will do, and I highly recommend interested readers attend or listen in. The program details are below.

The Use of Structural Presumptions in Merger Analysis

June 26, 2015, 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM ET

Moderator:

• Brendan Coffman, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati LLP

Speakers:

• Angela Diveley, Office of Commissioner Joshua D. Wright, Federal Trade Commission
• Abbott (Tad) Lipsky, Latham & Watkins LLP
• Janusz Ordover, Compass Lexecon
• Henry Su, Office of Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, Federal Trade Commission

In-person location:

Latham & Watkins
555 11th Street,NW
Ste 1000
Washington, DC 20004

Register here.

Filed under: antitrust, federal trade commission, ftc, law and economics, markets, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions Tagged: ABA, dissent, economic analysis, empirical evidence, Federal Trade Commission, ftc, joshua wright, merger guidelines, mergers, presumption, structural presumption

Filed under: consumer protection, federal communications commission, regulation, technology, telecommunications Tagged: Federal Communications Commission, innovation, regulation, technology