TOTM

Section 2 Symposium: Josh Wright on An Evidence Based Approach to Exclusive Dealing and Loyalty Discounts

The primary anticompetitive concern with exclusive dealing contracts is that a monopolist might be able to utilize exclusivity to fortify its market position, raise rivals’ costs of distribution, and ultimately harm consumers.  The unifying economic logic of these anticompetitive models of exclusivity is that the potential entrant (or current rival) must attract a sufficient mass of retailers to cover its fixed costs of entry, but that the monopolist’s exclusive contracts with retailers prevent the potential entrant from doing so.   However, the exclusionary equilibrium in these models are relatively fragile, and the models also often generate multiple equilibria in which buyers reject exclusivity. At the exclusive dealing hearings where I testified, a sensible consensus view emerged that a necessary condition for exclusive dealing or de facto exclusive contracts such as market-share discounts or loyalty discounts to cause competitive harm is that they deprive rivals of the opportunity to compete for access to distribution sufficient to achieve minimum efficient scale.

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