The WSJ Reports that the American Booksellers Association has knocked on Christine Varney’s door at the Antitrust Division to complain about the new low prices resulting from the price war between Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart.  The complaint?

Read the full piece here.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FTC is investigating whether retailer Toys-R-Us has violated the antitrust laws by inducing certain manufacturers to set minimum resale prices for their products (i.e., to engage in resale price maintenance, or “RPM”).

Read the full piece here.

Steve’s post responding to me and Josh on antitrust exemptions and buyer cartels raised a number of interesting issues.   A few points in response…

Read the full piece here.

Geoff mentions the pending bills on the Hill that would grant merchants an antitrust exemption to negotiate interchange fees.  The insurance industry exemption has also been in the news of late in the wake of the Democrats’ threats of repeal.  Here’s what I’m puzzled about.  Other than self-interested parties that have a lot to gain from an exemption (I’d like an exemption from income taxes if anybody cares), why won’t anybody say that industry exemptions from the Sherman Act price-fixing prohibitions are decidedly not a good thing for consumers?

Read the full piece here.

Today David Henderson has penned the traditional Wall Street Journal commentary on yesterday’s Nobel award to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. He provides an excellent summary of the importance of their work, and I recommend it to you highly. In fact, David’s theme reconciles what some commenters have observed as a political or ideological contradiction. For example, Cheryl Morgan notes that both Henry Farrell and I are thrilled at the prize, and that…

Read the full piece here.

Some serious reading first on American Needle, Inc. v. National Football League, No. 08-661 (U.S. S. Ct.)…

Read the full piece here.

In Alchian and Demsetz’s (1972) nexus-of-contracts approach to the firm, bosses don’t necessarily hire workers; workers may just as easily hire bosses. Recall Cheung’s (1983, p. 8) famous illustration: “My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.” In Alchian and Demsetz’s example, the employee can “fire” his employer by quitting, just as I can “fire” my grocer by shopping at a different store.

Read the full piece here.

Volume 16, Issue 4 of the George Mason Law Review (which I received in my mailbox today) has a well timed issue from its antitrust symposium featuring several articles on revisions to the Merger Guidelines.  Especially recommended is DOJ economist Greg Werden’s article here, which usefully sets the stage for some of the important debates.  Here is a key excerpt from Werden’s analysis, which I think can fairly be interpreted as coming out “against” revision…

Read the full piece here.

As I skimmed through the White House White Paper on innovation (HT: Patently-O), I noticed that a repeated theme in the document is that US innovation policy must “Promote Competitive Markets that Spur Productive Entrepreneurship” (e.g., p. 9).   There is no real substantive discussion of antitrust issues in the White Paper, except for the following passage, suggesting that the key role for antitrust in promoting innovation is to…

Read the full piece here.