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One must applaud the efforts of Commissioners Ohlhausen and Wright to begin the dialogue about the proper use of Section 5 as a tool of antitrust enforcement. It was 99 years ago that Congress was debating the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and increased guidance on the Commission’s thinking on Section 5 is in order.

Read the full piece here.

The FTC has long been on a quest to find the elusive species of conduct that Section 5 alone can tackle.  A series of early Supreme Court cases interpreting the FTC Act – the most recent and widely cited of which is more than forty years old (FTC v. Sperry & Hutchinson Co., 405 U.S. 233 (1972)) –appeared to grant the FTC wide ranging powers to condemn methods of competition as “unfair.”  A series of judicial setbacks in the 1980s and early 1990s, however, scaled back Section 5’s domain.

It’s not often that I disagree with my friend and co-author, FTC Commissioner Josh Wright, on an antitrust matter.  But when it comes to the proper legal treatment of loyalty discounts, the Commish and I just don’t see eye to eye.

In a speech this past Monday evening, Commissioner Wright rejected the view that there should be a safe harbor for single-product loyalty discounts resulting in an above-cost price for the product at issue.  A number of antitrust scholars—including Herb Hovenkamp, Dan Crane, and yours truly—recently urged the Supreme Court to grant cert and overturn a Third Circuit decision refusing to recognize such a safe harbor.  Commissioner Wright thinks we’re wrong.

A single-product loyalty discount occurs when a seller conditions a price cut (either an ex ante discount or an ex post rebate) on a buyer’s purchasing some quantity of a single product from the seller.  The purchase target is often set as a percentage of the buyer’s requirements, as when a medical device manufacturer offers to pay a 20% rebate on all of a hospital’s purchases of the manufacturer’s device if the hospital buys at least 70% of its requirements of that type of device from the manufacturer.  Because a loyalty discount tends to encourage distributors to carry more of the discounting manufacturer’s brand and less of the brands of the discounter’s rivals, such a discount may tend to “foreclose” those rivals from available distribution outlets.  If the degree of foreclose is so great that rivals have to cut their output below minimum efficient scale (the minimum output level required to achieve all economies of scale), then the discount may “raise rivals’ costs” relative to those of the discounter and thereby harm consumers.

On all these points, Commissioner Wright and I are in agreement.  Where we differ is on the question of whether a loyalty discount resulting in a discounted price that is above the discounter’s own cost should give rise to antitrust liability.  I say no.  I take that position because such an “above-cost loyalty discount” could be matched by any rival that is as efficient a producer as the discounter.  If, for example, a manufacturer normally charges $1.00 for widgets it produces for $.79 each but offers a 20% loyalty discount to retailers that buy 70% of their widget requirements from the manufacturer, any competitor that could produce a widget for $.79 (i.e., any equally efficient rival) could stay in business by lowering its price to the level of its incremental cost.  Thus, any rival that loses sales because of a manufacturer’s above-cost loyalty discount must be either less efficient than the manufacturer (so it can’t match the manufacturer’s discounted price) or unwilling to lower its price to the level of its cost.  In either case, the rival is unworthy of antitrust’s protection, where that protection amounts to prohibiting price cuts that provide consumers with immediate benefits.

Commissioner Wright disputes (I think?) the view that equally efficient rivals could match all above-cost loyalty discounts.  He maintains that loyalty discounts may be structured so that

[a] distributor’s purchase of an additional unit from a rival supplier beyond the threshold level can result in a loss of rebates large enough to render rival suppliers unable to attract a distributor to purchase the marginal unit at prices at or above the marginal cost of producing the good.

While I’m not entirely certain what Commissioner Wright means by this remark, I think he’s making the point that a loyalty discounter’s equally efficient rival might not be able to attract purchases by matching the discounter’s above-cost loyalty rebate if the rival’s “regular” base of sales is substantially smaller than that of the discounter.

If that is indeed what Commissioner Wright is saying, he has a point.  Suppose, for example, that the market for tennis balls consists of two brands, Penn and Wilson, that current market shares, reflective of consumer demand, are 60% for the Penn and 40% for Wilson, and that retailers typically stock the two brands in those proportions. Assume also that it costs each manufacturer $.90 to produce a can of tennis balls, that each sells to retailers for $1 per can, and that minimum efficient scale in this market occurs at a level of production equal to 35% of market demand. Suppose, then, that Penn, the dominant manufacturer, offers retailers a 10% loyalty rebate on all purchases made within a year if they buy 70% of their requirements for the year from Penn. The $.90 per unit discounted price is not below Penn’s cost, so the loyalty discount would come within my safe harbor.

Nevertheless, the loyalty discount could have the effect of driving Wilson from the market.  After implementation of the rebate scheme, a typi­cal retailer that previously purchased sixty cans of Penn for $60 and forty cans of Wilson for $40 could save $7 on its 100-can tennis ball require­ments by spending $63 to obtain seventy Penn cans and $30 to obtain thirty Wilson cans. The retailer and others like it would thus have a strong incen­tive to shift pur­chases from Wilson to Penn. To prevent a loss of mar­ket share that would drive it below minimum efficient scale (35% of market demand), Wilson would need to lower its price to provide retailers with the same total dollar discount, but on a smaller base of sales (40% of a typical retailer’s require­ments rather than 60%). This would require it to lower its price below cost. For example, Wilson could match Penn’s $7 discount to the retailer described above only by reducing its $1 per-unit price by 17.5 cents ($7.00/40 = $.175), which would require it to price below its cost of $.90 per unit.  Viewed statically, then, it seems that even an above-cost loyalty discount could occasion competitive harm by causing rivals to be less efficient, so that they could not match the discounter’s price.

In light of dynamic effects, though, I’m not convinced that examples like this undermine the case for a safe harbor for above-cost loyalty discounts. Had the nondominant rival (Wilson) charged a price equal to its marginal cost prior to Penn’s loyalty rebate, it would have enjoyed a price advantage and likely would have grown its market share to a point at which Penn’s loyalty rebate strat­egy could not drive it below minimum effi­cient scale. Moreover, one strategy that would prevent a nondominant but equally efficient firm from being harmed by a dominant rival’s above-cost loyalty rebate would be for the non-dominant firm to give its own volume discounts from the outset, secur­ing up-front commitments from enough buy­ers (in exchange for discounted prices) to ensure that its production stayed above minimum efficient scale. Such a strategy, which would obvi­ously benefit consumers, would be encouraged by a liability rule that evaluated loy­alty discounts under straight­forward Brooke Group principles (i.e., that included a safe harbor for above-cost discounts) and thereby signaled to manufacturers that they must take steps to protect themselves from above-cost loyalty discounts.

Commissioner Wright maintains that all this discussion of price-cost comparisons is inapposite because the theoretical harm from loyalty discounts stems from market exclusion (and its ability to raise rivals’ costs), not from predation.  He says, for example:

• “[T]o the extent loyalty discounts raise competition concerns, the concerns are about anticompetitive exclusion and, as a result, the legal framework developed to evaluate exclusive dealing claims ought to be used to evaluate claims relating to loyalty discounts.” [p. 12]
• “[P]redatory pricing and raising rivals’ costs are distinct paradigms of potentially exclusionary conduct. There simply is not a stable relative relationship between price and cost in raising rivals’ cost models that form the basis of anticompetitive exclusion, and hence it does not follow that below cost pricing is a necessary condition for competitive harm.”  [pp. 19-20]
• “When plaintiffs allege that loyalty discounts … violate the antitrust laws because they deprive rivals of access to a critical input, raise their costs, and ultimately harm competition, they are articulating a raising rivals’ cost theory of harm rather than price predation.”  [p. 24]
• “Raising rivals’ costs and predation are two different economic paradigms of exclusionary conduct, and economic models within each paradigm establish the necessary conditions for each practice to harm competition and give rise to antitrust concerns. Loyalty discounts and other forms of partial exclusives … are properly analyzed under the exclusive dealing framework. Price?cost tests in the predatory pricing tradition … simply do not comport with the underlying economics of exclusive dealing.”  [p. 33]

I must confess that I’m baffled by Commissioner Wright’s oddly formalistic pigeonholing.  Why must a practice be one or the other—either pricing too low or excluding rivals and thereby raising their costs?  That seems like a false dichotomy.  Indeed, it seems to me that a problematic loyalty discount is one in which the discounter excludes its rivals from a substantial portion of the distribution network (and thereby raises their costs) via the mechanism of conditional price cuts. It’s “both-and,” not “either-or.”  And if that’s the case, then surely it makes sense to limit which price cuts may occasion liability—i.e., only those that could not be matched by equally efficient rivals.  [It is important to note here that I don’t advocate a price-cost test as an alternative to a foreclosure-based analysis.  Rather, a plaintiff should have to establish below-cost pricing (to show that the plaintiff was deserving of antitrust’s protection via the highly disfavored prohibition of discounts) and demonstrate that the discounting at issue resulted in substantial foreclosure from distribution outlets (the latter showing is necessary to prove harm to competition rather than simply to a competitor).]

Throughout his speech, Commissioner Wright emphasizes that the primary competitive concern presented by loyalty discounts is the possibility of “anticompetitive exclusion.”  He writes on page 8, for example, that “[t]he key economic point is that the antitrust concerns potentially arising from loyalty discounts involve anticompetitive exclusion rather than predatory pricing….”  On page 12, he reiterates that “to the extent loyalty discounts raise competition concerns, the concerns are about anticompetitive exclusion.”  He then apparently assumes that loyalty discount-induced exclusion is “anticompetitive” if it is sufficiently substantial—i.e., if the discounter’s rivals are foreclosed from so many distribution outlets that they are driven below minimum efficient scale so that their costs are raised relative to those of the discounter.

I would dispute the notion that discount-induced exclusion is anticompetitive simply because it’s substantial.  Rather, I’d say such exclusion is anticompetitive only if it is substantial and could not have been avoided by aggressive pricing.  Omitting the second requirement creates the possibility that antitrust will be used by a laggard rival to prevent a more aggressive rival’s consumer-friendly price competition.  (LePage’s anyone?)

Suppose, for example, that there are two producers of widgets, A and B, which both produce widgets at a marginal cost of $.79 and, given their duopoly, charge $1.00 per widget.  A, whose market share has hovered around 50%, institutes a loyalty rebate of 20% for retailers that purchase 70% of their requirements from A.  If B offers the same deal, or simply cuts its price to $.80, it should lose no market share.  But suppose B doesn’t do so, A captures 70% of the market, and B falls below minimum efficient scale.  Would we say that B’s exclusion is “anticompetitive” because A’s discount scheme resulted in such substantial foreclosure that it raised B’s costs?  Should B be able to collect treble damages for based on its “anticompetitive exclusion”?  Surely not.

Commissioner Wright, from whom I have learned more about “error costs” than anyone else, seems oddly unconcerned about the chilling effect his decidedly pro-plaintiff approach to loyalty discounts will produce.  Wouldn’t a firm considering a loyalty discount—a price cut, don’t forget!—think twice if it knew its rivals could sit on their hands, claim “exclusion” if the discount successfully moved substantial market share toward the discounter, and collect treble damages?  The safe harbor Hovenkamp, Crane, and I have advocated would provide assurance to potential discounters that they will not face liability if they charge above-cost prices, prices that could be matched by equally efficient, aggressive rivals.  Isn’t that approach more likely to minimize error costs?

Two closing points.  First, despite my disagreement with Commissioner Wright on this issue, I share the widely held view that he is one of the most brilliant antitrust thinkers out there.  He’s taught me more about antitrust than anyone (with the possible exception of the uber-prolific Herb Hovenkamp).  His questioning of my views on loyalty discounts really makes me wonder if I’m missing something.

Second, to those who think Commissioner Wright has “drifted” or “turned,” let me assure you that he’s long held his views on loyalty discounts.  As you can see here, here, and here, we’ve been going round and round on this matter for quite some time.

Perhaps one day one of us will persuade the other.

Filed under: antitrust, economics, error costs, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, federal trade commission, law and economics, monopolization, regulation

Today, a group of eighteen scholars, of which I am one, filed an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to review a Court of Appeals decision involving loyalty rebates.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently upheld an antitrust judgment based on a defendant’s loyalty rebates even though the rebates resulted in above-cost prices for the defendant’s products and could have been matched by an equally efficient rival.  The court did so because it decided that the defendant’s overall selling practices, which involved no exclusivity commitments by buyers, had resulted in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” and thus were not subject to the price-cost test set forth in Brooke Group.  (For the uniniated, Brooke Group immunizes price cuts that result in above-cost prices for the discounter’s goods.)  We amici, who were assembled by Michigan Law’s Dan Crane, believe the Third Circuit’s decision threatens to chill proconsumer discounting practices and should be overruled.

The defendant in the case, Eaton, manufactures transmissions for big trucks (semis, cement trucks, etc.).  So did plaintiff Meritor.  Eaton and Meritor sold their products to the four manufacturers of big trucks.  Those “OEMs” installed the transmissions into the trucks they sold to end-user buyers, who typically customized their trucks and thus could select whatever transmissions they wanted.  Meritor claimed that Eaton drove it from the market by entering into purportedly exclusionary “long-term agreements” (LTAs) with the four OEMs.  The agreements did not require the OEMs to purchase any particular amount of Eaton’s products, but they did provide the OEMs with rebates (resulting in above-cost prices) if they bought high percentages of their requirements from Eaton.  The agreements also provided that Eaton could terminate the agreements if the market share targets were not met. Each LTA contained a “competitiveness clause” that allowed the OEM to purchase transmissions from another supplier without counting the purchases against the share target, or to terminate the LTA altogether, if another supplier offered a lower price or better product and Eaton could not match that offering.  Following adoption of the LTAs, Eaton’s market share grew, and Meritor’s shrank.  Before withdrawing from the U.S. market altogether, Meritor filed an antitrust action against Eaton.

Eaton insisted, not surprisingly, that it had simply engaged in hard competition.  It grew its market share by offering a lower price that an equally efficient rival could have matched.  Meritor’s failure, then, resulted from either its relative inefficiency or its unwillingness to lower its price to the level of its cost.  By immunizing above-cost discounted prices from liability, the Brooke Group rule permits and encourages the sort of competition in which Eaton engaged, and it should, the company argued, control here.

The Third Circuit disagreed.  This was not, the court said, a simple case of price discounting.  Instead, Eaton had engaged in what the court called “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  The exclusive dealing was “partial”  because OEMs could purchase some transmissions from other suppliers and still obtain Eaton’s loyalty rebates (i.e., complete exclusivity was not required).  It was “de facto” because purchasing exclusively (or nearly exclusively) from Eaton was not contractually required but was instead simply the precondition for earning a rebate.  Nonetheless, reasoned the court, the gravamen of Meritor’s complaint was some sort of exclusive dealing, which is evaluated not under Brooke Group but instead under a rule of reason that focuses on the degree to which the seller’s practices foreclose its rivals from available sales opportunities.  Under that test, the court concluded, the judgment against Eaton could be upheld.  After all, Eaton’s sales practices won lots of business from Meritor, whose sales eventually shrunk so much that the company exited the market.

As we amici point out in our brief to the Supreme Court, the Third Circuit ignored the fact that it was Eaton’s discounts that led OEMs to buy so much from the company (and forego its rival’s offerings).  Absent an actual promise to buy a high level of one’s requirements from a seller, any “exclusive dealing” resulting from a loyalty rebate scheme results from the fact that buyers voluntarily choose to patronize the seller over its competitors because the discounter’s products are cheaper.  In other words, low pricing is the very means by which any “exclusivity” — and, hence, any market foreclosure — is achieved.  Any claim alleging that an agreement not mandating a certain level of purchases but instead providing for loyalty rebates results in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” is therefore, at its heart, a complaint about price competition.  Accordingly, it should be subject to the Brooke Group screening test for discounts resulting in above-cost pricing.

The Third Circuit wrongly insisted that Eaton had done something more sinister than win business by offering above-cost loyalty rebates.  It concluded that Eaton “essentially forced” the four OEMs (who likely had a good bit of buyer market power themselves) to accept its terms by threatening “financial penalties or supply shortages.”  But these purported “penalties” and threats of “supply shortages” appear nowhere in the record.

The only “penalty” an OEM would have incurred by failing to meet a purchase target is the denial of a rebate from Eaton.  If that’s enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then any conditional price cut resulting in an above-cost price falls outside the decision’s safe harbor, for failure to meet the discount condition would subject buyers to a “penalty.”  Proconsumer price competition would surely be chilled by such an evisceration of Brooke Group.  As for threats of supply shortages, the only thing Meritor and the Third Circuit could point to was Eaton’s contractual right to cancel its LTAs if OEMs failed to meet purchase targets.  But if that were enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then the decision’s price-cost test could never apply when a dominant seller offers a conditional rebate or discount.  Because the seller could refuse in the future to supply buyers who fail to qualify for the discount, there would be, under the Third Circuit’s reasoning, not just a loyalty rebate but also an implicit threat of “supply shortages” for buyers that fail to meet the seller’s purchase targets.

This is not the first case in which a plaintiff has sought to evade a price-cost test, and thereby impose liability on a discounting scheme that would otherwise pass muster, by seeking to recharacterize the defendant’s conduct.  A few years back, a plaintiff (Masimo) sought to evade the Ninth Circuit’s PeaceHealth decision, which creates a Brooke Group-like safe harbor for certain bundled discounts that could not exclude equally efficient rivals, by construing the defendant’s conduct as “de facto exclusive dealing.”  Dan Crane and I participated as amici in that case as well.

I won’t speak for Dan, but I for one am getting tired of working on these briefs!  It’s time for the Supreme Court to clarify that prevailing price-cost safe harbors cannot be evaded simply through the use of creative labels like “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  Hopefully, the Court will heed our recommendation that it review — and overrule — the Third Circuit’s Meritor decision.

[In case you’re interested, the other scholars signing the brief urging cert in Meritor are Ken Elzinga (Virginia Econ), Richard Epstein (NYU and Chicago Law), Jerry Hausman (MIT Econ), Rebecca Haw (Vanderbilt Law), Herb Hovenkamp (Iowa Law), Glenn Hubbard (Columbia Business), Keith Hylton (Boston U Law), Bill Kovacic (GWU Law), Alan Meese (Wm & Mary Law), Tom Morgan (GWU Law), Barak Orbach (Arizona Law), Bill Page (Florida Law), Robert Pindyck (MIT Econ), Edward Snyder (Yale Mgt), Danny Sokol (Florida Law), and Robert Topel (Chicago Business).]

Filed under: antitrust, economics, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, law and economics, monopolization, regulation, Supreme Court

In the past two weeks, Members of Congress from both parties have penned scathing letters to the FTC warning of the consequences (both to consumers and the agency itself) if the Commission sues Google not under traditional antitrust law, but instead by alleging unfair competition under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The FTC is rumored to be considering such a suit, and FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Republican Commissioner Tom Rosch have expressed a desire to litigate such a so-called “pure” Section 5 antitrust case — one not adjoining a cause of action under the Sherman Act. Unfortunately for the Commissioners, no appellate court has upheld such an action since the 1960s.

Read the full piece here.

After more than a year of complaining about Google and being met with responses from me (see also here, here, here, here, and here, among others) and many others that these complaints have yet to offer up a rigorous theory of antitrust injury — let alone any evidence — FairSearch yesterday offered up its preferred remedies aimed at addressing, in its own words, “the fundamental conflict of interest driving Google’s incentive and ability to engage in anti-competitive conduct. . . . [by putting an] end [to] Google’s preferencing of its own products ahead of natural search results.”  Nothing in the post addresses the weakness of the organization’s underlying claims, and its proposed remedies would be damaging to consumers.

FairSearch’s first and core “abuse” is “[d]iscriminatory treatment favoring Google’s own vertical products in a manner that may harm competing vertical products.”  To address this it proposes prohibiting Google from preferencing its own content in search results and suggests as additional, “structural remedies” “[r]equiring Google to license data” and “[r]equiring Google to divest its vertical products that have benefited from Google’s abuses.”

Tom Barnett, former AAG for antitrust, counsel to FairSearch member Expedia, and FairSearch’s de facto spokesman should be ashamed to be associated with claims and proposals like these.  He better than many others knows that harm to competitors is not the issue under US antitrust laws.  Rather, US antitrust law requires a demonstration that consumers — not just rivals — will be harmed by a challenged practice.  He also knows (as economists have known for a long time) that favoring one’s own content — i.e., “vertically integrating” to produce both inputs as well as finished products — is generally procompetitive.

In fact, Barnett has said as much before:

Because a Section 2 violation hurts competitors, they are often the focus of section 2 remedial efforts.  But competitor well-being, in itself, is not the purpose of our antitrust laws.

Access remedies also raise efficiency and innovation concerns.  By forcing a firm to share the benefits of its investments and relieving its rivals of the incentive to develop comparable assets of their own, access remedies can reduce the competitive vitality of an industry.

Not only has FairSearch not actually demonstrated that Google has preferenced its own products, the organization has also not demonstrated either harm to consumers arising from such conduct nor even antitrust-cognizable harm to competitors arising from it.

As an empirical study supported by the International Center for Law and Economics (itself, in turn, supported in part by Google, and of which I am the Executive Director) makes clear, search bias simply almost never occurs.  And when it does, it is the non-dominant Bing that more often practices it, not Google.  Moreover, and most important, the evidence marshaled in favor of the search bias claim (largely adduced by Harvard Business School professor, Ben Edelman (whose work is supported by Microsoft)) demonstrates that consumers do, indeed, have the ability to detect and counter allegedly biased results.

Recall what search bias means in this context.  According to Edelman, looking at the top three search results, Google links to its own content (think Gmail, Google Maps, etc.) in the first search result about twice as often as Yahoo! and Bing link to Google content in this position.  While the ICLE paper refutes even this finding, notice what it means:  “Biased” search results lead to a reshuffling of results among the top few results offered up; there is no evidence that Google simply drops users’ preferred results.  While it is true that the difference in click-through rates between the top and second results can be significant, Edelman’s own findings actually demonstrate that consumers are capable of finding what they want when their preferred (more relevant) results appears in the second or third slot.

Edelman notes that Google ranks Gmail first and Yahoo! Mail second in his study, even though users seem to think Yahoo! Mail is the more relevant result:  Gmail receives only 29% of clicks while Yahoo! Mail receives 54%.  According to Edelman, this is proof that Google’s conduct forecloses access by competitors and harms consumers under the antitrust laws.

But is it?  Note that users click on the second, apparently more-relevant result nearly twice as often as they click on the first.  This demonstrates that Yahoo! is not competitively foreclosed from access to users, and that users are perfectly capable of identifying their preferred results, even when they appear lower in the results page.  This is simply not foreclosure — in fact, if anything, it demonstrates the opposite.

Among other things, foreclosure — limiting access by a competitor to a necessary input — under the antitrust laws must be substantial enough to prevent a rival from reaching sufficient scale that it can effectively compete.  It is no more “foreclosure” for Google to “impair” traffic to Kayak’s site by offering its own Flight Search than it is for Safeway to refuse to allow Kroger to sell Safeway’s house brand.  Rather, actionable foreclosure requires that a firm “impair[s] the ability of rivals to grow into effective competitors that erode the firm’s position.”  Such quantifiable claims are noticeably absent from critic’s complaints against Google.

And what about those allegedly harmed competitors?  How are they faring?  As of September 2012, Google ranks 7th in visits among metasearch travel sites, with a paltry 1.4% of such visits.  Residing at number one?  FairSearch founding member, Kayak, with a whopping 61% (up from 52% six months after Google entered the travel search business).  Nextag.com, another vocal Google critic, has complained that Google’s conduct has forced it to shift its strategy from attracting traffic through Google’s organic search results to other sources, including paid ads on Google.com.  And how has it fared?  It has parlayed its experience with new data sources into a successful new business model, Wize Commerce, showing exactly the sort of “incentive to develop comparable assets of their own” Barnett worries will be destroyed by aggressive antitrust enforcement.  And Barnett’s own Expedia.com?  Currently, it’s the largest travel company in the world, and it has only grown in recent years.

Meanwhile consumers’ interests have been absent from critics’ complaints since the beginning.  And not only do they fail to demonstrate any connection between harm to consumers and the claimed harms to competitors arising from Google’s conduct, but they also ignore the harm to consumers that may result from restricting potentially efficient business conduct — like the integration of Google Maps and other products into its search results.  That Google not only produces search results but also owns some of the content that generates those results is not a problem cognizable by modern antitrust.

FairSearch and other Google critics have utterly failed to make a compelling case, and their proposed remedies would serve only to harm, not help, consumers.

Filed under: antitrust, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, technology Tagged: antitrust, Bing, expedia, FairSearch, Federal Trade Commission, google, Nextag, tom barnett, Yahoo

Judge Douglas Ginsburg (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals; NYU Law) and I have posted “Dynamic Antitrust and the Limits of Antitrust Institutions” to SSRN.  Our article is forthcoming in Volume 78 (2) of the Antitrust Law Journal.  We offer a cautionary note – from an institutional perspective – concerning the ever-increasing and influential calls for greater incorporation of models of dynamic competition and innovation into antitrust analysis by courts and agencies.

Here is the abstract:

The static model of competition, which dominates modern antitrust analysis, has served antitrust law well.  Nonetheless, as commentators have observed, the static model ignores the impact that competitive (or anti-competitive) activities undertaken today will have upon future market conditions.  An increased focus upon dynamic competition surely has the potential to improve antitrust analysis and, thus, to benefit consumers.  The practical value of proposals to increase the use of dynamic analysis must, however, be evaluated with an eye to the institutional limitations that antitrust agencies and courts face when engaged in predictive fact-finding.  We explain and evaluate both the current state of dynamic antitrust analysis and some recent proposals that agencies and courts incorporate dynamic considerations more deeply into their analyses.  We show antitrust analysis is not willfully ignorant of the limitations of static analysis; on the contrary, when reasonably confident predictions can be made, they are readily incorporated into the analysis.  We also argue agencies and courts should view current proposals for a more dynamic approach with caution because the theories underpinning those proposals lie outside the agencies’ expertise in industrial organization economics, do not consistently yield determinate results, and would place significant demands upon reviewing courts to question predictions based upon those theories.  Considering the current state of economic theory and empirical knowledge, we conclude that competition agencies and courts have appropriately refrained from incorporating dynamic features into antitrust analysis to make predictions beyond what can be supported by a fact-intensive analysis.

You can download the paper here.

Filed under: antitrust, doj, economics, entrepreneurship, error costs, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, merger guidelines, mergers & acquisitions, monopolization, settlements, technology

The FTC is having a conference in the economics of drip pricing:

Drip pricing is a pricing technique in which firms advertise only part of a product’s price and reveal other charges later as the customer goes through the buying process. The additional charges can be mandatory charges, such as hotel resort fees, or fees for optional upgrades and add-ons. Drip pricing is used by many types of firms, including internet sellers, automobile dealers, financial institutions, and rental car companies.

Economists and marketing academics will be brought together to examine the theoretical motivation for drip pricing and its impact on consumers, empirical studies, and policy issues pertaining to drip pricing. The sessions will address the following questions: Why do firms engage in drip pricing? How does drip pricing affect consumer search? Where does drip pricing occur? When is drip pricing harmful? Are there efficiency justifications for the practice in some situations? Can competition prevent firms from harming consumers through drip pricing? Can consumer experience or firm reputation limit harm from drip pricing? What types of policies could lead to improved consumer decision making and under what circumstances should such policies be applied?

The workshop, which will be free and open to the public, will be held at the FTC’s Conference Center, located at 601 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC. A government-issued photo ID is required for entry. Pre-registration for this workshop is not necessary, but is encouraged, so that we may better plan for the event.

Here is the conference agenda:

8:30 a.m.	Registration
9:00 a.m.	Welcome and Opening Remarks Jon Leibowitz, Chairman, Federal Trade Commission
9:05 a.m.	Overview of Drip Pricing Mary Sullivan, Federal Trade Commission
9:15 a.m.	Consumer and Competitive Effects of Obscure Pricing Joseph Farrell, Director, Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission
9:45 a.m.	Theories of Drip Pricing Chair, Doug Smith, Federal Trade Commission
[Presentation]	David Laibson, Harvard University
[Presentation]	Michael Baye, Indiana University
[Presentation]	Michael Waldman, Cornell University
[Comments]	Discussion leader Michael Salinger, Boston University
11:15 a.m.	Morning Break
11:30 a.m.	Keynote Address Amelia Fletcher, Chief Economist, Office of Fair Trading, UK
12:00 p.m	Lunch
1:00 p.m.	Empirical Analysis of Drip Pricing Chair, Erez Yoeli, Federal Trade Commission
[Presentation]	Vicki Morwitz, New York University
[Presentation]	Meghan Busse, Northwestern University
[Presentation]	Sara Fisher Ellison, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[Comments]	Discussion leader Jonathan Zinman, Dartmouth College
2:30 p.m.	Afternoon Break
2:45 p.m.	Public Policy Roundtable
	Moderator, Mary Sullivan, Federal Trade Commission
	Panelists
	Michael Baye, Indiana University
	Sara Fisher Ellison, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
	Rebecca Hamilton, University of Maryland
	David Laibson, Harvard University
	Vicki Morwitz, New York University
	Michael Salinger, Boston University
	Michael Waldman, Cornell University
	Florian Zettelmeyer, Northwestern University
	Jonathan Zinman, Dartmouth College
3:45 p.m.	Closing Remarks

Filed under: antitrust, behavioral economics, economics, federal trade commission, price discrimination, truth on the market

In the past weeks, the chatter surrounding a possible FTC antitrust case against Google has risen in volume, thanks largely to the FTC’s hiring of litigator Beth Wilkinson.  The question remains, however, what this aggressive move portends and, more importantly, why the FTC is taking it.

Read the full piece here.