Antitrust Law Research Articles

Dynamic Challenges to Market Definition and Market Power Evaluation in Antitrust Cases: The Long Road Ahead

Dynamic Challenges to Market Definition and Market Power Evaluation in Antitrust Cases: The Long Road Ahead

Uncovering the Differences among Compliance Officers, Corporate Monitors and Trustees under Antitrust and Anti-Corruption Laws

Uncovering the Differences among Compliance Officers, Corporate Monitors and Trustees under Antitrust and Anti-Corruption Laws

Why Do Corporations Merge and Why Should Law Care?

Mergers and acquisitions are extraordinarily prevalent in the United States, generating massive expenditures every year. However, a serious empirical puzzle lies at the heart of all that activity. That empirical phenomenon’s most remarkable feature by far is that even though it is well established in an extensive literature and implies far-reaching policy consequences, American law ignores it entirely. Generations of researchers have failed to find evidence that merger and acquisition activity generates any lasting benefits for the combining firms’ owners or anyone else. No one seriously doubts that efficiencies of scale or technological integration are real or that acquisitions sometimes achieve them. Still, the evidence strongly implies that they are mostly available in small deals among small firms. While the results are no longer very seriously contested, no one has any conclusive explanation for the several puzzles they pose. This paper comprehensively reviews the empirical literature and works through the policy implications for the major bodies of law it affects. The most important insights are two. First, the evidence should undermine the confidence among scholars of corporation law in the regulatory self-sufficiency of market institutions, on which corporation theory depends so heavily. In particular, a major hope for controlling managerial agency cost—one of the theory’s chief preoccupations—remains the hope that the so-called “market for corporate control” governing hostile takeovers will discipline underperforming managers. The evidence discussed here suggests that the market produces no meaningful benefits at all. The second lesson is simpler. The other major legal regime governing mergers and acquisitions—antitrust—should return to the simpler, pro-enforcement presumptions by which it once more effectively limited market concentration. The fear of jeopardizing pro-competitive gains, on which antitrust merger law has been rendered largely inert, is no longer very defensible. The balance between false positive and false negative should be reset.

Courts, Competence, and Competition: Brewing Tensions Between Administrative, Antitrust, and Securities Law

Courts, Competence, and Competition: Brewing Tensions Between Administrative, Antitrust, and Securities Law

Brief of Amicus Curiae Antitrust, Business, and Sports Law Professors in Support for the Petition of Certiorari in Tri-City Valley Cats v. The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball (Sup. Ct. 2023)

Brief of Amicus Curiae Antitrust, Business, and Sports Law Professors in Support for the Petition of Certiorari in Tri-City Valley Cats v. The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball (Sup. Ct. 2023)

Investigations in European antitrust law

The Commission is responsible for investigating cartel law violations and imposing fines on companies. The investigations are carried out in an administrative procedure in which the facts of the case must be investigated in compliance with the rule of law. Here, fundamental rights must be guaranteed. In this respect, the jurisdiction of the ECJ still shows deficits, as it is based on the assumption that human rights belong exclusively to human beings. When legal persons are fined, they must be granted the guarantees of constitutional law.

Antitrust Accountability Delayed: State Antitrust Enforcement and Multidistrict Litigation

State Attorneys General play a crucial role in the enforcement of antitrust laws. Defendants have successfully delayed state enforcement proceedings by centralizing them with private lawsuits in multidistrict litigation. A new venue law has foreclosed that delay tactic, placing State Attorneys General on equal footing with federal antitrust enforcers in deciding where, when, and how to prosecute antitrust cases.

Antitrust Regulation of Algorithmic Collusion

With the development of science and technology and the progress of the times, the design and application of algorithms have a clear impact on market competition. While the deepening of their application has brought great convenience to economic life, it has also given opportunities to "speculators". In order to seek higher profits, operators may conspire to monopolize based on algorithms that collect information about consumer choices and changes in the market environment. This paper will analyze the concept of algorithmic collusion, the challenges brought by algorithmic collusion to traditional antitrust law and how to regulate it to justify the necessity and reasonableness of antitrust regulation of algorithmic collusion.

Market Power and Antitrust Law Enforcement: Does the Local Presence of Antitrust Forces Matter?

Market Power and Antitrust Law Enforcement: Does the Local Presence of Antitrust Forces Matter?

Regulating Reverse Payment Agreements in Pharmaceutical Market: A Comprehensive Framework for Antitrust Review

Reverse payment settlement agreement is a type of arrangement between original and generic drug manufacturers that could potentially violate Antitrust Laws by limiting competition, typically appear in the pharmaceutical market. This paper addresses the impact of these agreements on public interests, and the challenges in conducting antitrust review on these agreements. This paper then proposes a comprehensive framework for regulating reverse payment agreements in the context of China’s extensive and complex pharmaceutical market by drawing on the experiences of the United States and the European Union. The framework introduces a two-step antitrust review system for regulating patent settlement agreements, which is suggested by the author to be applied in both patent litigation and daily detection. This paper also advocates establishing an agreement filing system and utilizing the antitrust public interest litigation system in antitrust regulation. This proposed framework provides specific guidance on initiation of antitrust review with respect to multiple backgrounds, in order to protect consumer interests in affordable healthcare, deter anti-competitive behavior, and contribute to the theoretical basis for future legislation.

Think Twice, It’s Alright: Innovative Antitrust Cases, Innovation Costs, and the Possibilities of an Innovative Criminal Antitrust Law

Think Twice, It’s Alright: Innovative Antitrust Cases, Innovation Costs, and the Possibilities of an Innovative Criminal Antitrust Law

Impact of Digitalizing Healthcare Business Operations on Cybersecurity Landscape

The technological evolution and digitalization of business operations contributed to healthcare organizations' constantly changing cybersecurity landscape. It is compulsory and mandated by the covered entities to fully comply with the industry regulatory standards, procedures, laws, and guidelines. The compliance officer must pay attention to the change in the business operations and the laws governing the organization's business operation. Developing an automated cybersecurity team that will track the change in the cybersecurity landscape of healthcare businesses as the business operations move toward digitalization and adoption of artificial intelligence-driven solutions. Adopting AI as a defensive measure requires an organization to monitor and assess the patent application landscape before deploying any AI intellectual property for its risk mitigation strategy or infrastructure protection. The security team must ensure that the usage of AI at the organization complies with the US federal and state antitrust laws. The organization's security team will implement control to identify data retention limits and regulate and permit the use of personally identifiable information within the organization. The enforcement will be via an organization's processes, functions, or approved mechanisms. The security team will implement binding techniques to strengthen the information flow enforcement process. This paper will elaborate on the binding technique that will regulate the number of users accessing the organization's resources or information. Keywords: Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Controls, Compliance, Rule & Regulation. Journal Reference Format: Yamcharoen P., Folorunsho O.S., Bayewu A. & Ojo T.P. (2022): Impact of Digitalizing Healthcare Business Operations on Cybersecurity Landscape. Journal of Behavioural Informatics, Digital Humanities and Development Research. Vol. 8.No. 4, Pp 27-34. Available online at https://www.isteams.net/behavioralinformaticsjournal. dx.doi.org/10.22624/AIMS/BHI/V8N4P3

Analytical Review of Court Cases Involving the Antitrust Authority

Analysis of the legal positions of arbitration courts in cases of violation of antimonopoly legislation in terms of consideration of issues: control over economic concentration, administrative responsibility, creation of preferential conditions for participation in the competition, imposition of unfavorable conditions of the contract.Purpose: formation of uniform approaches in law enforcement practice in cases of violation of antitrust laws.

Qualification of Violations of Antitrust Laws in Parallel Imports of Goods: a Comparative Legal Aspect

The practice of the antimonopoly authorities of Russia and foreign countries in relation to violations in the field of parallel imports of goods has been studied. The problems of qualification of this type of offenses (including in the law enforcement practice of a number of foreign states) in terms of vertical agreements and abuse of dominant position are identified. The authors conclude that the positions of the antimonopoly authorities of Russia and a number of foreign countries are similar on the issue of abuse of the right of legal monopolies for trademarks: a legal monopoly for trademarks should not be a basis for abuse of the right by the right holder and restriction of the possibility of free movement of goods and services marked with trademarks. According to the authors, it is advisable to use the experience of foreign countries when qualifying violations in the field of parallel imports to Russia.

ENDOGENOUS FORMATION OF A JOINT LAB IN AN OLIGOPOLISTIC MARKET: PRIVATE INCENTIVES, COLLECTIVE INCENTIVES AND WELFARE

In this paper, we study the endogenous formation of a joint lab in an oligopolistic market. We compare the situation where N firms choose their R&D efforts non-cooperatively and the situation where a subset of firms conduct their R&D through a partial joint lab. We show that the profits of the firms joining a lab increase with its size until a certain critical size. Beyond this critical size, the profits of the players decrease with the growth of the dimension of the lab. An important result yields that the socially optimum size of the lab is lower than the equilibrium size when the output spillover levels are sufficiently low such as applied research. The policy implications to this result suggest the intervention of public authorities to prohibit firms to form the grand joint lab or partial cooperations that can emerge spontaneously but are detrimental to social welfare through the strengthening of antitrust laws.

What Law Schools Must Change to Train Transactional Lawyers

Not all lawyers litigate, but you would not know that from the first-year curriculum at most law schools. Despite 50% of lawyers working in transactional practices, schools do not incorporate its legal doctrines or skills in the foundational first year. That the Progressives pushed through antitrust laws and the New Dealers founded the modern administrative state reframed how people use the law, particularly in transactional practices, and should be given equal weight as the appellate-based common law in any legal introduction. Nevertheless, the law school model created by Christopher Columbus Langdell in the 1870s remains dominant. As this review of fifty-four law schools’ required curricula shows, law schools have largely retained Langdell’s curriculum. This negatively affects young transactional lawyers because their critical first year does not show them the law as a preventative, problem-solving practice. This Article proposes fundamental changes to the way law schools prepare students to be transactional and other types of attorneys by reframing the first year from various common law topics to a focus on practice areas. This Article argues that it is faculty, fear, and funding that prevent fundamental change to the first year and other required curriculum even as change is necessary for the health of law schools and the legal profession. This Article concludes that, in the face of curriculum stagnation, the ABA accrediting body and bar examiners should recognize these changes by requiring and testing these “new” areas of law.

A Diplomatic Meeting: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Art of Summitry by James Cooper

<i>A Diplomatic Meeting: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Art of Summitry</i> by James Cooper

Innovation and profitability following antitrust intervention against a dominant platform: The wild, wild west?

AbstractResearch SummaryThis study examines whether “unblocking” competition through antitrust intervention against a dominant platform can spur complementor innovation in platform ecosystems. Using a novel dataset on enterprise infrastructure software and a difference‐in‐differences design, we examine the relation between the U.S. antitrust intervention against Microsoft (dominant enterprise platform) and subsequent innovation and profitability of infrastructure applications firms (complementors). The data show that innovation among complementors—particularly ones with low market share—soared when the competitive pressure on the dominant platform amplified. However, the profitability of these complementors dropped. Our results contribute to understanding links between competition and innovation in platform ecosystems, as well as the opportunities and threats related to dominant platforms in those ecosystems.Managerial SummaryComplementors (apps, services) that are owned by their platforms often have an unfair advantage. Antitrust action challenges the power of such dual platform‐complementors, reasoning that unfair advantage blocks fair competition, and, in turn, reduces firms' incentives to innovate and thus limits consumer choice. We examine whether reducing anticompetitive barriers and platform‐complementors' power revitalizes the platform ecosystem. Using a landmark antitrust case, we find mixed results: while complementors do innovate more, their profits go down. In particular, the low‐share complementors that bring in the most innovation are also the ones that lose the most financially, suggesting that they may have over‐relied on the platform for key assets. To develop a healthy ecosystem in the long run, platform owners may want to resist the temptation to keep complementors weak and instead help support their development to stand on their own.

How power is created and exercised—often invisibly

First paragraph: The steady drumbeat of headlines this year reveal­ing the harms caused by concentrated ownership in the food system (Anderson &amp; Weaver, 2022; Gutman, 2022; Hope-D’Anieri, 2022; Krupnick, 2022; Qiu, 2022; Snodgrass, 2022) shows renewed interest in a topic that was a central concern of American politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The revised edition of Philip Howard’s Concentration and Power in the Food System comes just in time to help us understand not only the degree and nature of concentration in our food system, but also how various kinds of concentra­tion enable the exercise of power in ways that were unantici­pated by earlier anti-trust legislation and which need to be addressed in new ways.

Legal diffusion as protectionism: the case of the U.S. promotion of antitrust laws

Prior research on the global diffusion and harmonization of antitrust (competition) laws mainly focused on the motivations of countries newly adopting or reforming their national laws. This article instead inquires about the motivations of the powerful states promoting these laws internationally, primarily focusing on the United States. It finds that trade protectionist —rather than globalist— interests and ideas prompted the United States’ promotion of strong international antitrust norms in the 1990s. Analyzing Congressional documents and debates in the 1980s, it shows that American import-competing companies framed foreign industrial policies as cartelization to legitimize their demands for trade protections within the dominant framework of free markets and domestic antitrust laws. The political salience of this narrative in Congress contributed to the preparation of the 1988 Trade Laws and the 1990 trade negotiations with Japan, which formalized the United States’ preference for strong international antitrust norms during the 1990s. These findings highlight that, ironically, ‘anti-market’ reasons can also motivate ‘pro-market’ norm diffusion.