My colleague and co-author Bruce Kobayashi has posted The Law and Economics of Predatory Pricing to SSRN and is forthcoming in Keith Hylton’s Antitrust Law and Economics volume (Edward Elgar Publishing).  It is a comprehensive and insightful review of the expansive legal and economic literatures on this topic.

Read the full piece here.

Jonathan Baker (American University) has posted Market Concentration in the Antitrust Analysis of Horizontal Mergers to SSRN. Baker’s article is another of the entries which will be appearing in the forthcoming Antitrust Law and Economics volume edited by Keith Hylton (Elgar Publishing) (see this post for links to others).

Read the full piece here.

In the comments to this post, Peter Swire (Ohio State) points to some recent comments (see also here and  here) he submitted to the Federal Trade Commission on how to incorporate privacy into conventional antitrust analysis.  The privacy and antitrust link appears to be something that will receive quite a bit of attention in the coming months and years.  The basic argument in favor of incorporating privacy into antitrust analysis under appropriate circumstances is not too controversial…

Read the full piece here. 

Barak Richman (Duke) has posted The Antitrust of Reputation Mechanisms: Institutional Economics and Concerted Refusals to Deal to SSRN (forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review).

Read the full piece here.

Stan Liebowitz has posted a reply to Oberholzer-Gee/Strumpf’s (O/S) referee report/ reply to Liebowitz’s original comment submitted and rejected by the JPE for publication (got all that?) (HT: Newmark and Peter). Stan includes email exchanges between himself and OS concerning access to the data (O/S did not allow access), copies of the rejection letter from Steve Levitt, and responds to the O/S reply on the merits.

Read the full piece here.

Randy Picker (HT: Randy) has posted an interesting new paper to SSRN entitled “Competition and Privacy in Web 2.0 and the Cloud“.   It is an insightful look at the how privacy rules imposed on Web intermediaries might raise competition concerns.  Consider, for example, the relationship between privacy rules and vertical integration that Picker highlights as a potential unintended consequence of privacy rules…

Read the full piece here. 

From FTC Commissioner Rosch:

Personally, I think simulation analyses and indeed any kind of economic analyses that require the use of mathematical formulae are of little persuasive value in the courtroom setting. When I see an economic formula my eyes start to glaze over, and if the formula uses Greek letters I tend to think “it’s all Greek to me.” I think that’s the way that courts view this evidence too.  Simulation analyses and the like were presented in the Oracle, Swedish Match and Staples trials, and in all three instances the courts (including some pretty sophisticated judges) virtually ignored them… .

Most economists, however well prepared, will not have the industry experience to serve as the primary “storytellers.” However, they can play an important complementary role and reinforce the testimony of those witnesses by presenting data respecting prices, entry, diversion and/or price erosion.

This passage of a very interesting speech gave me some pause.  A few points…

Read the full piece here. 

In a new article in the June 2008 issue of Antitrust Source, Howard Marvel discusses what the rule of reason could and should look like in the Post-Leegin world as well as the different proposals to a rule of reason approach articulated by the states and the FTC in the recent Nine West consent order modification. For interested readers, Marvel is much more generous to the FTC decision than co-blogger Thom who not to long ago posted a harsh (and in my view, fairly devastating on both legal and economic grounds) critique of the Commission’s approach.

Read the full piece here.

Related to Thom’s post on behavioral economics and the problem of conflicting or offsetting biases, the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) held a conference on June 18^th 2008 (audio available at the link above). The conference was, as I understand it, designed as a precursor to the AAI’s release of a “Transition Report” to the next administration, offering its own view of antitrust enforcement agenda. The conference kicked off with a keynote from Donald Langevoort (Georgetown), filling in for Cass Sunstein, on behavioral economics and its potential role in antitrust followed by a panel discussion. After listening and reading Thom’s post, and informed by some of the work that I’ve done comparing the empirical predictions of “traditional” microeconomic theory with behavioral economics in consumer contracting markets and finding that the former outperforms the latter, I had a few reactions to what I heard from the keynote and panelists.

Read the full piece here.