Apple has filed its response to the DOJ Complaint in the e-books case.  Here is the first paragraph of the Answer:

The Government’s Complaint against Apple is fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law. Apple has not “conspired” with anyone, was not aware of any alleged “conspiracy” by others, and never “fixed prices.” Apple individually negotiated bilateral agreements with book publishers that allowed it to enter and compete in a new market segment – eBooks. The iBookstore offered its customers a new outstanding, innovative eBook reading experience, an expansion of categories and titles of eBooks, and competitive prices.

And the last paragraph of the Answer’s introduction:

The Supreme Court has made clear that the antitrust laws are not a vehicle for Government intervention in the economy to impose its view of the “best” competitive outcome, or the “optimal” means of competition, but rather to address anticompetitive conduct. Apple’s entry into eBook distribution is classic procompetitive conduct, and for Apple to be subject to hindsight legal attack for a business strategy well-recognized as perfectly proper sends the wrong message to the market, and will discourage competitive entry and innovation and harm consumers.

A theme that runs throughout the Answer is that the “pre-Apple” world of e-books was characterized by little or no competition and that the agency agreements were necessary for its entry, which in turn has resulted in a dramatic increase in output.  The Answer is available here.  While commentary has focused primarily upon the important question of the competitive effects of the move to the agency model, including Geoff’s post here, my hunch is that if the case is litigated its legacy will be as an “agreement” case rather than what it contributes to rule of reason analysis.  In other words, if Apple gets to the rule of reason, the DOJ (like most plaintiffs in rule of reason cases) are likely to lose — especially in light of at least preliminary evidence of dramatic increases in output.  The critical question — I suspect — will be about proof of an actual naked price fixing agreement among publishers and Apple, and as a legal matter, what evidence is sufficient to establish that agreement for the purposes of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.  The Complaint sets forth the evidence the DOJ purports to have on this score.  But my hunch — and it is no more than that — is that this portion of the case will prove more important than any battle between economic experts on the relevant competitive effects.

Filed under: antitrust, business, cartels, contracts, doj, e-books, economics, error costs, law and economics, litigation, MFNs, monopolization, resale price maintenance, settlements, technology, vertical restraints Tagged: agency model, Amazon, antitrust, Apple, doj, e-books, iBookstore, major publishers, MFN, most favored nations clause, per se, price-fixing, publishing industry, Rule of reason, vertical restraints

Call for Papers

AALS Section on Insurance Law

“Insurance and Consumer Protection”

2013 AALS Annual Meeting
January 4-7, 2013
New Orleans, Louisiana

The AALS Section on Insurance Law will hold a program on Insurance and Consumer Protection during the AALS 2013 Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The program is scheduled for Sunday, January 6, 2013, from 10:30 AM to 12:15 PM. The program will feature a panel of leading research on consumer protection and insurance markets. Panelists scheduled to participate include: Shawn Cole (Harvard Business School), Kyle Logue (University of Michigan Law School), and Lauren Willis (Loyola Law School Los Angeles). We are looking to add one additional panelist through this Call for Papers.

Submissions: To be considered, a draft paper or proposal must be submitted by email to Joshua C. Teitelbaum, Program Chair, at [email protected]. A proposal must be comprehensive enough to allow for a meaningful evaluation of the proposed paper. Submissions must be in PDF format.

Deadline: The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, September 4, 2012. Decisions will be announced by Friday, September 28, 2012.

Eligibility: Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit. Faculty at fee-paid law schools; foreign, visiting and adjunct faculty members; graduate students; fellows; and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Papers may already be accepted for publication, provided that the paper will not be published before the AALS meeting.

Expenses: The panelist selected through this Call for Papers will be responsible for paying his or her own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

Inquiries: Inquiries about this Call for Papers may be submitted to Joshua C. Teitelbaum, Georgetown University Law Center, [email protected], (202) 661-6589.

Filed under: consumer protection

Last week the New York Times ran an article, “Building the Next Facebook a Tough Task in Europe“, by Eric Pfanner, discussing the lack of major high tech innovation in Europe.  Eric Pfanner discusses the importance of such investment, and then speculates on the reason for the lack of such innovation.  The ultimate conclusion is that there is a lack of venture capital in Europe for various cultural and historical reasons.  This explanation of course makes no sense.  Capital is geographically mobile and if European tech start ups were a profitable investment that Europeans were afraid to bankroll, American investors would be on the next plane.

Here is a better explanation.  In the name of “privacy,” the EU greatly restricts the use of consumer online  information.  Josh Lerner has a recent paper, “The Impact of Privacy Policy Changes on Venture Capital Investment in Online Advertising Companies” (based in part on the work of Avi Goldfarb and Catherine E. Tucker, “Privacy Regulation and Online Advertising“) finding that this restriction on the use of information is a large part of the explanation for the lack of tech investment in Europe.  Tom Lenard and I have written extensively about the costs of privacy regulation (for example, here) and this is just another example of these costs, although the costs are much greater in Europe than they are here (so far.)

Filed under: advertising, consumer protection, intellectual property, privacy, regulation, technology

One topic that has long interested me is the source of dislike or hatred of capitalism; my Southern Economics Journal article “Folk Economics” (ungated version)  dealt in part with this topic. Today’s New York Times has an op-ed, “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths” by William Deresiewicz, who has taught English at Yale and Columbia, that both illustrates and explains this hatred.  What is interesting about this column is that it is entirely about the character and behavior of “the rich” including entrepreneurs.  The job creating function of business is briefly mentioned but most of the article focuses on “fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury.”

What is nowhere mentioned is anything to do with the goods and services produced by business.  This is a common attitude of critics of capitalism.  In many cases, capitalists may suffer the same personality defects as the rest of us.  And, as Mr. Deresiewicz points out, scientists, artists and scholars may also be hard working and smart.  But capitalism does not reward moral worth or hard work.  Capitalism rewards providing stuff  that other people are willing to pay for.  While is is easy to point out the stupidity of the critique (Mr. Deresiewicz has written and seems proud of his book, published by a capitalist publisher and available from various capitalist booksellers) that is not my point.  Rather, this column is interesting in that it is a pristine example of a totally irrelevant critique of capitalism, written by what is a smart person.  He does cite Adam Smith, but seems to misunderstand the basic functioning of markets.  Markets reward what one does, not what one is.

Filed under: business, corporate social responsibility, economics, entrepreneurship, markets, social responsibility

Last week, the FTC hired outside litigator Beth Wilkinson to lead an investigation into Google’s conduct, which some in the press have interpreted as a grave sign for the search company. The FTC is reportedly interested in pursuing Google under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits a firm from engaging in “unfair methods of competition.” Along with Bob Litan, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division during the Microsoft investigation, I have penned a short paper on the FTC’s seemingly unorthodox Section 5 case against Google. (Disclosure: This paper was commissioned by Google.)

Read the full piece here.

The AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation call for papers features a topic near and dear to my heart this year: Google and Antitrust.   Here is the announcement:

Call for Papers Announcement

AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation

Google and Antitrust

 

2013 AALS Annual Meeting

January 4-7, 2013

New Orleans, Louisiana

The AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation will hold a program on Google and Antitrust during the AALS 2013 Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The program will explore the Federal Trade Commission’s potential antitrust case against Google and the Google Book Search settlement. The program will feature a roundtable panel involving leading scholars who have addressed these issues: Dan Crane (Michigan), Marina Lao (Seton Hall), Frank Pasquale (Seton Hall), and Pam Samuelson (Berkeley). We are looking to add one additional panelist through this Call for Papers.

Submission procedure:

Anyone interested in participating is encouraged to submit a draft paper (preferred, and roughly in the range of 20-40 pages) or proposal by e-mail to Michael A. Carrier, at [email protected] by September 4, 2012.

Eligibility:

Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Faculty at fee-paid law schools; foreign, visiting and adjunct faculty members; graduate students; fellows; and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Papers may already be accepted for publication, as long as the paper will not be published before the AALS meeting.

Registration fee and expenses:

Call-for-Paper participants will be responsible for paying their annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

How will papers be reviewed?

Papers will be reviewed and selected by members of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Antirust and Economic Regulation: Darren Bush (Houston), Michael Carrier (Rutgers-Camden), Daniel Crane (Michigan), Hillary Greene (Connecticut), Scott Hemphill (Columbia), and D. Daniel Sokol (Florida).

Will the program be published in a journal?

Yes, as a symposium in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Digest.

Deadline date for submission:

September 4, 2012. Decisions will be announced by September 28, 2012.

Program date and time:

Saturday, January 5, 2013, 10:30am – 12:15pm.

Contact for submission and inquires:

Michael A. Carrier

Chair, AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation

Rutgers Law School – Camden
217 North Fifth Street
Camden, NJ 08102
(856) 225-6380
[email protected]

Filed under: antitrust, copyright, economics, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, settlements

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. 

Catching up on my blog reading, I see Chillin’ Competition had a Friday Slot interview with Damien Geradin recently, as well.  Also worth checking out.  I especially like this:

What you like the least about economics in competition law?

Mind boggling theories disconnected from the real world. These are a complete waste of time.

Amen, Brother!

Filed under: antitrust, musings Tagged: Damien Geradin