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One of the most important changes in the antitrust laws over the past 40 years has been the diminished reliance of rules of per se illegality in favor of a rule of reason analysis. With the Court’s recent rulings in Leegin (eliminating per se rule for minimum RPM) and Independent Ink (eliminating the per se rule against intellectual property tying), the evolution of the antitrust laws has left only tying (under a “modified” per se rule) and horizontal price fixing under per se rules of illegality. This movement reflects advances in law and economics that recognize that vertical restraints, once condemned as per se illegal when used by firms with antitrust market power, can be procompetitive. It also reflects the judgment that declaring such practices pre se illegal produced high type I error costs (the false condemnation and deterrence of pro competitive practices).

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The “error cost” or “decision theory” approach to Section 2 legal standards emphasizes the probabilities and costs of errors in monopolization decisions.  Two types of error, and two associated types of cost are examined.  One type of error is that of a false acquittal, or false negative.  The other type of error is that of a false conviction, or false positive.  Under the error cost approach to legal standards, a legal standard should be chosen that minimizes the total expected costs of errors.

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Given the embarrassing outcome of the FTC/DOJ single-firm conduct hearings, it is worth revisiting what the organizers of the hearings were attempting to accomplish.  The Federal Register notice announcing the hearings provides some key insights.  It read, in part…

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When the Justice Department issued its Unilateral Conduct Report last September, it became an instant sensation not primarily because of its content, but because of a strident public critique issued by three FTC Commissioners, including now-Chairman Leibowitz. The three (Harbour, Leibowitz and Rosch, hereinafter “HLR”) accused the Antitrust Division of placing “a thumb on the scales in favor of firms with monopoly . . . power”, and of adopting “drastic changes” comprising “a legal regime [that places] . . . the interests of firms that enjoy monopoly or near monopoly power . . .ahead of the interests of consumers”. Thundering on, HLR savaged the DOJ Report as a “blueprint for radically weakened enforcement of Section 2”, accusing DOJ of “seriously overstat[ing] the level of . . . consensus” on Section 2, and of improperly glorifying economics as “tantamount to the law itself”. Although signed by three of the four Commission members, the Statement was not presented as a position of the FTC, leaving observers to wonder about the internal process that produced the HLR statement and what it reflected about the views of the various Bureaus and other key Commission staff. For FTC/DOJ relations, already rocked by a long series of public disagreements over a string of antitrust issues (reverse-payment Hatch-Waxman settlements, price squeezes), this was a new low, unprecedented in the living memory of the antitrust bar.

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A new law in Maryland will take effect on October 1 and will re-instate the Dr. Miles rule for minimum RPM. The Wall Street Journal reports that it is a “move that could lead to lower prices for consumers across the country.” I doubt it. There are quite a few reasons to believe that shifts back to Dr. Miles will not result in lower retail prices, much less higher output (recall that the price effects are less interesting here from a consumer welfare perspective because both cartel theories and pro-competitive theories under which RPM facilitates demand-enhancing promotional services predict upward price movement). For instance, the most likely outcome of the move to per se illegality (whether at the state or federal level through legislation) is that firms contract around the rule with more costly contractual arrangements or vertical integration. To the extent that these alternative arrangements are indeed less efficient, those costs will be passed on to consumers. And of course, the empirical evidence tells us that RPM is generally output-enhancing, not anticompetitive.

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My colleague Adam Mossoff is blogging over at the Volokh Conspiracy on his fascinating paper, A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket. Here’s an excerpt from the first post…

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Answer: not by a long shot.  Not in the Supreme Court.  Not in the empirical economics literature.  But perhaps according to at least one FTC Commissioner in the new FTC annual report…

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I’ve posted to SSRN a new essay entitled Overshot the Mark?  A Simple Explanation of the Chicago School’s Influence on Antitrust.  It is a book review of Robert Pitofsky’s recent volume How the Chicago School Overshot the Mark: The effect of Conservative Economic Analysis on U.S. Antitrust, and is forthcoming in Volume 5 of Competition Policy International.

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First, I want to join the rest of the participants in congratulating Professor Carrier on an excellent and well-written book emerging out of a thoughtful and ambitious project. The project, and the book, are provocative, important contributions to the literature, and usefully synthesize many of the most important debates in both antitrust and intellectual property.

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