An article in today’s WSJ, Price-Fixing Makes Comeback After Supreme Court Ruling, reports that minimum resale price maintenance (i.e., the setting of minimum retail prices by product manufacturers) is increasing in light of last summer’s Leegin decision. That’s great news for me, because I’ve spent most of the summer cranking out an article on how exactly such price-fixing should be evaluated now that the Dr. Miles rule of per se legality is dead.

Read the full piece here.

As the start of the new academic year inches closer, and students are deciding what courses to take, I thought I’d give a little plug to antitrust law. I’ve seen enrollment in antitrust courses vary dramatically over the past 10 years or so since I was a student and now as a professor. I certainly know the case against taking antitrust: “its not a bar course,” “you have to know a bunch of economics, right?”, and “its really difficult.”  But I hear this question from students frequently and I thought I’d share my typical answer to the titular question here…

Read the full piece here. 

In response to my post about the optimal institutional design for merger enforcement and the problems associated with dual federal enforcement, a reader points me to this related paper by Jon Klick, Francesco Parisi, and Norbert Schulz in the International Review of Law and Economics which models alternatives for allocating decision-making across multiple agencies. One of the fundamental insights is that fragmented regulatory authority can result in actions that produce various sorts of externalities in regulatory competition. For example, in concurrent regulation, one might think of the first agency’s decision to approve a merger as increasing the size of the rents that can be extracted by the second actor. This might be a good model of the sizeable extraction achieved by the FCC in the satellite radio merger.

Read the full piece here. 

Financial Times (HT: Danny Sokol) highlights the problem of multi-jurisdictional antitrust enforcement, emphasizing the rise of India and China.  The article repeats the basic point, worth repeating, that international cooperation can help avoid bad outcomes with multiple regulatory stakeholders with different incentives and institutional environments…

Read the full piece here. 

Over at Overcoming Bias, they are asking the following question:

Given how little it seems to cost to have someone killed, why don’t more corporations have their competitors’ leaders knocked off?

There are interesting answers in the comments suggesting that perhaps these killings or rival firms’ leaders are more common or more costly than commonly thought. Here’s a different question that only an antitrust junkie would ask: Would such a corporate assassination give rise to an antitrust violation?

Read the full piece here.

While much has been said about the recent Milton Friedman Institute scuffle at the University of Chicago (including here at TOTM here), Chicago GSB Professor John Cochrane’s scathing comments on the original Protest letter have stirred up some additional commentary worth reading.  In particular, Craig Newmark (who adds the new fact that apparently the Protest letter was not sent to the economics department, the GSB, or the Institute — does this mean it was sent to the law school?) and Steve Horwitz, who quiet nicely turns the Protesters complaints about the negative externalities imposed on “other” Chicago faculty by the university’s free-market reputation on its head…

Read the full piece here. 

Geoff and Thom (see the comments) continue to have the Whole Foods litigation covered.  I don’t and can’t have anything to add to their comments about the particulars of the litigation.  I will note, playing off my previous post on bad case law out there looking to be overturned, that there is significant demand for some guidance from the Supreme Court on horizontal mergers and market definition in particular.

Read the full piece here.

The DC Circuit has reversed the district court in the Whole Foods case.  The opinion is here.  [HT:  Danny Sokol]

As regular readers know, we have covered this case extensively on this blog, including most recently this great, lengthy post from Thom on the proper standard of review.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Thom is disappointed with the standard adopted by the DC Circuit in its appeal, and I look forward to his thoughts.

Read the full piece here. 

My colleague Tom Hazlett (George Mason University) has a characteristically thoughtful and provocative column in the Financial Times on the recent Clearwire joint venture and what it tells us about the “innovation commons” and current public policy debates such as network neutrality, spectrum property rights, and municipal wi-fi. Here’s an excerpt…

Read the full piece here.