Antitrust Suit Research Articles

The Propriety and Inevitability of Netting in Antitrust Class Actions

How to define “antitrust injury” is an issue that has been the source of much debate among judges, lawyers, and academics alike. Specifically, a disagreement exists as to whether participation in a single transaction, which a defendant has allegedly tainted via anticompetitive behavior, is sufficient to constitute antitrust injury. Complicating this area of jurisprudential and doctrinal uncertainty are cases in which a plaintiff who has alleged injury as a result of anticompetitive conduct later reaped offsetting gains resulting from that very same conduct. The disagreements regarding the role of these net beneficiaries, and the netting process necessary to identify them, in antitrust suits implicate matters that extend far beyond legal theory. This Note outlines the multitude of ways in which the foregoing consequences manifest. It then highlights the propriety of a contextual approach in which courts are more willing to engage in nuanced and substantive class certification analyses that balance the interests of the litigants and the goals of the antitrust laws. The Note uses financial markets, and variations among the instruments therein, as a specific instantiation of these principles and a context in which a nuanced approach is especially compelling. It concludes by demonstrating that, regardless of whether a court incorporates netting into its definition of antitrust injury, it will have to contend with netting principles during the class–certification process.

The Price Tag of "Pay-for-Delay"

In a landmark decision nearly a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door for antitrust suits against brand and generic pharmaceutical companies who engage in collusive settlements to delay the time for the generic to come to market. With these “pay-for-delay” agreements, brand-name companies offer prospective generics some form of compensation in exchange for the generic’s promise not to enter the market until an agreed-upon date. Laying the groundwork for the lawsuit that would eventually lead to the Actavis decision, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) published a study estimating that pay-for-delay agreements cost American consumers $3.5 billion annually, a figure that has been cited repeatedly by scholars and policymakers alike.
 To understand the state of pay-for-delay agreements, this Article presents an in-depth examination of the burden that pay-for-delay imposes, both on society at large and on individual patients, and explores the modern legal landscape that has emerged since the Supreme Court’s historic pronouncement. Part I describes pay- for-delay agreements, exploring the literature on the potential harm of such agreements among pharmaceutical competitors. Part II presents a new analysis demonstrating that the cost of pay-for-delay to American consumers is far greater than anyone has recognized, and well beyond the $3.5 billion figure cited by the FTC in 2010. We applied six different methodologies to provide as fair and broad a view as possible. The range of methodologies show that at a minimum, the cost of pay-for-delay settlements on the U.S. population between 2006 and 2017 is $6.2 billion per year—almost double that of the FTC’s estimate. The methodology with the largest result suggests that the cost could be as high as $37.1 billion per year— ten times higher. Part III argues that courts are allowing this costly problem to flourish unchecked. This part reviews pay-for-delay decisions since Actavis, arguing that the courts have failed to properly analyze such cases from the perspective of all three notions inherent in the words “pay,” “for,” and “delay.” Finally, Part IV offers a path forward through the doctrinal haze.

The Economic Rationale of United States v. Google

In 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an antitrust suit against Google alleging that Google has unlawfully monopolized the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising. The complaint raises questions involving market definition, monopoly power, and monopolizing conduct. In this article, we examine these issues through the lens of microeconomic principles. Our analysis finds that there is a sound economic rationale for the DOJ’s complaint.

Salt, Smurthwaite, and Smith: The Origins of the Modern Legal Identity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Salt, Smurthwaite, and Smith: The Origins of the Modern Legal Identity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Epic Games v. Apple: A Case Summary

At the heart of the legal battle between Epic Games and Apple is a set of restrictions Apple imposes on app developers. For instance, Apple prohibits the distribution of iOS apps outside of the App Store, which Apple fully controls. Apple similarly requires developers to exclusively use its own in-app payment system for app purchases and in-app purchases for digital content. Through this system, Apple automatically collects a 30% commission on all such transactions. Dissatisfied with these policies, Epic Games tried to use its flagship game Fortnite as leverage to convince Apple to open up its closed platform. After Apple refused, Epic Games violated the App Store rules by enabling its own payment method in the Fortnite iOS app on August 13, 2020. That same day, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store and Epic Games filed an antitrust suit in a federal district court in California. Apple soon thereafter countersued for breach of contract. A yearlong trial ensued, the result of which is a 185-page decision, which was handed down by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on September 10, 2021. This summary condenses the Epic Games v. Apple decision into a six-page overview covering all the main parts of the decision. Part I of the summary covers the findings of fact, which includes the Court’s factual findings on the different product and geographic markets proposed by Epic Games and Apple, on the anticompetitive effects alleged by Epic Games, and on the business justifications put forward by Apple. Part II covers the application of the facts to the law and includes the Court’s legal market definition and market power assessment, its findings under federal antitrust law (Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act) and state antitrust law (California’s Cartwright Act and Unfair Competition Law), and its breach of contract findings.

BASF wins antitrust suit against Ingevity

A federal jury in Delaware sided with BASF in a lawsuit against the specialty chemical maker Ingevity. The dispute revolves around honeycomb-like scrubbers in fuel vapor canisters, an auto emissions control device. Ingevity sued BASF in 2018, alleging infringement of its patent on the honeycomb technology. In the course of those proceedings, a federal judge voided key claims in the patent. BASF then countersued, calling Ingevity’s conduct anticompetitive. The jury agreed and ordered Ingevity to pay BASF $28 million, which was automatically tripled. Ingevity says it will appeal.

The Price Tag of 'Pay-for-Delay'

In a landmark decision nearly a decade ago, the Supreme Court opened the door for antitrust suits against brand and generic pharmaceutical companies who engage in collusive settlements to delay the time for the generic to come to market. With these “pay-for-delay” agreements, brand-name companies offer prospective generic competitors cash or another form of compensation in exchange for the generic’s promise not to enter the market until an agreed-upon date. Laying the groundwork for the lawsuit that would eventually lead to the Actavis decision, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a study estimating that pay-for-delay agreements cost American consumers $3.5 billion annually, a figure that has been cited repeatedly by scholars and policy-makers alike. As this article will demonstrate, the $3.5 billion figure vastly understates the landscape. Moreover, although the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Actavis opened the door for antitrust litigation, courts have failed to follow through on the pathway provided. To understand the state of pay-for-delay agreements, this article presents an in-depth examination of the burden that pay-for-delay imposes, both on society at large and on individual patients, as well as exploring the modern legal landscape that has emerged since the Supreme Court’s historic pronouncement. Part I describes pay-for-delay agreements, exploring the literature on the potential harm of such agreements among pharmaceutical competitors. Part II presents a new analysis demonstrating that the cost of pay-for-delay to American consumers is far greater than anyone has recognized, and well beyond the $3.5 billion figure cited by the FTC in 2010. We applied six different methodologies to provide as fair and broad a view as possible. The range of methodologies show that at a minimum, the cost of pay-for-delay settlements on the U.S. population between 2006 and 2017 is a minimum of $6.4 billion per year—almost double that of the FTC’s estimate. The methodology with the largest result suggests that the cost could be as high as $36 billion per year—10 times higher. Part III argues that courts are allowing this costly problem to flourish unchecked. This part reviews pay-for-delay decisions since Actavis, arguing that the courts have failed to properly analyze such cases from the perspective of all three notions inherent in the words “pay,” “for,” and “delay.” Finally, Part IV offers a path forward through the doctrinal haze.

U.S. v. Google: A Tough Slog; But Maybe an Intriguing Possibility?

In October 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an antitrust suit against Google. It is an alleged monopolization (Sherman Act, Sec. 2) case. In this paper I lay out the main issues in the case and raise an intriguing possibility.

The Legality of Legacy Business Practices in Antitrust

There is void in the literature at the intersection of antitrust law and legacy business practices. This issue has come to forefront with Epic Games’ antitrust suit against Apple for its App Store policies, which have been in place ever since the online marketplace opened in 2008. The same issues are at the center of the current Apple v. Pepper litigation and in regulatory proposals to alter Apple’s business practices both at the state and federal levels. Legacy conduct has also played a role in the Supreme Court’s controversial Ohio v. American Express decision and the Ninth Circuit’s FTC v. Qualcomm decision. This raises a question as to how antitrust should treat long-standing business practices—practices that this Article labels “legacy conduct”—that initially were benign or even procompetitive, but which come under heavy scrutiny once the firm employing it obtains considerable market power. The fundamental question raised here is whether the fact that a product has become highly successful turns a previously legitimate business practice into one that antitrust should treat as objectionable. This Article contends that three fundamental considerations should govern the proper assessment of cases involving legacy conduct under a rule of reason analysis. Further, this Article advances a policy recommendation that legacy conduct instituted long before a firm achieves substantial market power (particularly at the time of entry) and is common across competitors who do not themselves possess substantial market power, should be considered probative evidence that the practice is procompetitive. When these conditions are satisfied, defendants should be afforded a substantially reduced burden in proving the restraint is procompetitive under a rule of reason analysis commensurate with the strength of the legacy evidence.

A Lincoln Legacy: The History of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan by David Gardner Chardavoyne with Hugh W. Brenneman Jr.

Reviewed by: A Lincoln Legacy: The History of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan by David Gardner Chardavoyne with Hugh W. Brenneman Jr. Paul Moreno David Gardner Chardavoyne with Hugh W. Brenneman Jr. A Lincoln Legacy: The History of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. Pp. 372. Photographs. Hardback: $44.99. With this fine volume of judicial history, David Chardavoyne (whom I've worked with for the Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society) has helped abate the envy that those of us in the Western District of Michigan have for the Eastern District. Chardavoyne wrote a fine history of the Eastern District in 2012 and that district has its own historical journal. A Lincoln Legacy is a comprehensive and encyclopedic account of the origins and development of this Grand Rapids-based federal court. It contains biographical information about all its judges, for example, which contain historical context that provides a fine background for the entire book. It also describes, with excellent photographs, the various buildings that have housed Western District courts over the years. This will be of interest not just to anyone who has worked in the legal world of the Wolverine State but also to anyone interested in its general history. But A Lincoln Legacy is much more than an encyclopedia. Readers will enjoy its stories most of all. Given the rise of American and global "juristocracy"—the ever-greater power of courts in our world—every citizen should know something about how courts and judges operate, and Chardavoyne tells many interesting tales. American courts have grown with the country. The decision to divide the state of Michigan into two districts (this is the "Lincoln legacy") is a story in itself. The fact that the Court's first case was U.S. v. One Piece of Ingrain Carpeting and Thirteen Yards of Gray Cloth tells us something about what federal courts do, and about the relative youth of the state in the 1860s. Baseball fans will enjoy Chardavoyne's account of the 1914 Federal League antitrust suit against catcher William Killefer, who had "jumped" from the Philadelphia Phillies to the new Federal League Chi-Feds and then jumped back when the Phillies made a counteroffer. Judge Clarence William Sessions is said to have upheld the notorious "reserve clause" that bound baseball players to their team owners in near-involuntary servitude. The reverse is closer to the truth. Sessions held against the Chi-Feds only because they did not meet the "clean hands" requirement in equity suits. In fact, he said in an obiter dictum that the clause would be unenforceable as an "executory contract … a contract to make a contract." (93) But it [End Page 143] would be over a half-century before the de facto enforcement of the reserve clause would end. Chardavoyne tells many fascinating stories about the enforcement of national prohibition in Michigan in the 1920s. The Eighteenth Amendment placed a tremendous burden on the federal courts, especially in Michigan, whose proximity to Canada made it a highway for rum-runners. It also met with serious resistance all over the country. Iron City's State Attorney Martin McDonough told the Scalucci brothers—restauranteurs and vintners whom the feds were prosecuting—that if the Feds returned they were free to "open fire on them." The T-Men in turn sought to arrest the Scaluccis for "rebellion." Authorities in Washington were able to arrange a compromise and avoid another civil war. Another valuable vignette concerns Judge Fred Morton Raymond's creative adaptation of the common law to prevent the guilty from escaping justice in a case involving the search of infamous bank-robber John Dillinger's automobile. The home front in World War II is nicely illustrated in the Office of Price Administration's enforcement of price-fixing and rationing. Post-Warren Court judicial activism at the district-court level is seen in liberal stalwart Noel Porter Fox, whose clerk "likened him to a modern-day chancellor in a court of equity, doing what was 'right' instead of what some might characterize as technically legal." (138) Many other features of and stores...

Court Denies Claims of Both Cigna and Anthem in Bitter Settlement Suit Over Failed Merger

Court Denies Claims of Both Cigna and Anthem in Bitter Settlement Suit Over Failed Merger

Measuring the Antitrust Revolution

Although antitrust always evolved with the economics of its time, economic analysis was not central to the antitrust enterprise until Continental T.V. Inc. v. GTE Sylvania. In doing so, the Court abandoned the multiple goals of the prior era to embrace a singular economic goal. With a singular goal, antitrust had become revolutionary. How to measure the antitrust revolution has been difficult. In this article, we focus on published case law, which provides a broad set of observations that includes government enforcement actions and private antitrust suits. We use the Caselaw Access Project database and its associated “Historical Trends” tool to track the usage of certain words and phrases in judicial opinions. This article is the first to measure antitrust terms in court cases that combine big data with data visualization techniques to better understand, based on the usage of common antitrust terms, the impact economics has had on decided cases.

Measuring the Antitrust Revolution

Though antitrust always evolved with the economics of its time, economic analysis was not central to the antitrust enterprise until Continental T.V. Inc. v. GTE Sylvania. In doing so, the Court abandoned the multiple goals of the prior era to embrace a singular economic goal. With a singular goal, antitrust had become revolutionary. How to measure the antitrust revolution has been difficult. In this article, we focus on published caselaw, which provides a broad set of observations that includes government enforcement actions and private antitrust suits. We use the Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) database and its associated “Historical Trends” tool to track the usage of certain words and phrases in judicial opinions. This article is the first to measure antitrust terms in court cases that combines big data with data visualization techniques to better understand, based on usage of common antitrust terms, the impact economics has had on decided cases.

Section 230: An Introduction for Antitrust & Consumer Protection Practitioners

This chapter focuses on complaints about “content moderation” because ICS providers are far more likely to be subject to unfair competition and consumer protection claims (meritorious or otherwise) for choosing not to carry, or promote, some third party’s content. The term is used throughout to include not only blocking or removing third party content or those who post it, but also limiting the visibility of that content (e.g., in “Safe Mode”), making it ineligible for amplification through advertising (even if the content remains up), or making it ineligible for “monetization” (i.e., having advertising appear next to it). We begin by providing an introduction to this statute, its origins, and its application by the courts since 1996. We then explain the interaction between Section 230 and the antitrust and consumer-protection laws. We conclude by discussing current proposals to amend or reinterpret Section 230 aimed specifically at making it easier to bring antitrust and consumer protection suits for content moderation decisions.

Parker v. Brown, the Eleventh Amendment, and Anticompetitive State Regulation

The Parker v. Brown (or “state action”) doctrine and the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution impose differen limits on antitrust suits challenging anticompetitive state regulation. The Supreme Court has developed these two versions of state sovereign immunity separately, and lower courts usually apply the immunities independently of each another (even in the same cases) without explaining their relationship. Nevertheless, the Court has derived the two immunities from the same principle of sovereign immunity, so it is worth considering why and how they differ, and what the consequences of the differences are for antitrust policy. The state action immunity is based on statutory interpretation of the Sherman Act; the Court has shaped the shaped the doctrine over seventy-five years, guided by both considerations of state sovereignty and antitrust policy, so it should reflect a balance of the two critical variables. The Eleventh Amendment immunity, by contrast, has nothing specifically to do with antitrust policy; it is a general constitutional doctrine based on state sovereignty, with some acknowledgment of the demands of general federal authority. Our concern is that the application of the broader immunity is can thwart the balance between state sovereignty and antitrust policy reflected in the antitrust-specific immunity. There are many differences between the immunities, but the only significant area of concern is in the subset of cases in which Eleventh Amendment immunity applies but the state action immunity does not—cases, in other words, in which the Supreme Court has chosen to deny Parker immunity to state-connected actors, in part because of considerations of antitrust policy. In those cases, the antitrust-specific version of sovereign immunity does not protect the state actors from damage liability, but the Eleventh Amendment immunity does. Is that a problem? To make a long story short, we conclude that the effect of the conflict on consumer welfare is probably small, because of the Eleventh Amendment immunity’s own limitations, and because of adaptations that public and private enforcers can make in case of a conflict. The outcome may, entirely by accident, be efficient.

Enabling and Incentivizing Standalone Private Antitrust Actions in Hong Kong — Lessons from the United States

In 2012, Hong Kong passed its Competition Ordinance which provides a right of follow-on action, but no right of standalone action to private parties. Through reviewing the legislative history, this article found that such right is absent primarily because small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) worried that large companies would strategically file excessive, or even baseless, suits against them. The U.S., which has many private antitrust suits, is cited as an example to support this concerns. This article attempts to shed light on this matter by (1) identifying why there are so many private antitrust suits in the U.S., (2) rethinking whether the U.S. model is one that Hong Kong should avoid and (3) highlighting how the U.S. regime prevents baseless suits. After addressing these matters, this article articulates (1) why enabling a standalone right of action to private parties itself would not open the floodgates of antitrust litigations in Hong Kong, (2) why it might be harmful to Hong Kong if there are insufficient private antitrust suits, especially when baseless suits are expected and (3) whether Hong Kong is prepared to enable a standalone right of action while expecting frivolous and baseless suits.

An Enquiry Meet for Professional Regulation: Lessons from PolyGram

After North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC, it is clear that the antitrust laws have an important role to play in reforming occupational licensing, but the exact framework remains an open question. Under a rule of reason analysis, health and safety rationales are off limits. But if state board cannot draw on these types of consumer protection arguments to defend their actions, as a practical matter, can a state board ever win an antitrust suit? Some have suggested applying a modified rule of reason to incorporate non-competition justifications. But these approaches threaten to summon the ghost of Lochner and raise problems of subjectivity and predictability that are sure to arise when courts and enforcers are called on to weigh losses in competition against purported gains across other dimensions. Rather than expanding the rule of reason to accommodate non-competition concerns, there is a better path that draws from PolyGram Holding, Inc. v. FTC. Given the vast empirical literature pointing to the harms from state regulation of professions, board actions that restrain competition should be treated as inherently suspect as a matter of law. As such, in an antitrust challenge, the burden of persuasion immediately should fall to the board to provide an efficiency rationale that is both cognizable and plausible. If the board cannot muster a story involving cognizable benefits to competition to justify the restraint, it should be condemned as per se illegal, and the authorizing law subject to preemption. If the board is able to offer a justification that sounds in competition, it still must provide a plausible reason why either the restraint offers procompetitive benefits or does not harm competition. If they cannot meet this burden, the restraint should be condemned summarily. If they do, courts will conduct a full-blown rule of reason in inquiry.

Hollywood Under Siege: Recent Books on Hollywood and Censorship

Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies, by William D. Romanowski. New York, Oxford University Press, 2012. xv, 298 pp. $31.95 US (cloth). J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood's Cold War, by John Sbardellati. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. viii, 256 pp. $27.95 US (cloth). The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, by Ben Urwand. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. 327 pp. $26.95 (cloth). There are two popular narratives about the much-abused Hollywood studio system. On the one hand, scholars from David Bordwell to Thomas Schatz have looked at its remarkable durability from the 1920s through the 1960s. For over thirty years, film production remained stable with a range of popular genres and stars, individual studios developed house styles, and above- and below-the-line talent often worked for the same studio for decades. Today, many filmmakers in Hollywood sigh for the lost golden age, the punch cards, the studio commissary, and regular employment. Hollywood films got American audiences through the Great Depression and World War II, with everyone from Shirley Temple to Frank Capra pitching in to articulate how we survived and why we fought. Studio-era Hollywood may have had to coexist with a certain amount of censorship and flack about block-booking and breaking anti-trust laws, but the Production Code Administration (PCA) was an industry-generated organization and did not really get in the way of great filmmaking. It was the government, via antitrust suits and anticommunist witch hunts, which really broke the Hollywood studio system. This narrative points to the other tendency within Hollywood film histories covering the period from 1930 through the 1950s. This is a darker story of censorship, FBI spying, government inquiries, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, the breakup of the integrated production-distribution-exhibition business model, and the overall decline of Hollywood. This is a history of Hollywood under siege. This second narrative produces and sells far more academic and popular books than the first. Ben Urwand (The Collaboration, 2013), William D. Romanowski (Reforming Hollywood, 2012), and John Sbardellati (J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies, 2012) position themselves as revisionist film historians whose works are based on revelations from rarely explored archival collections. Urwand and Romanowski go further and argue that their books depart from the dominant discourse and historiography on their subjects, forcing a major reconsideration of how we think about questions of industry machinations and censorship. Yet these two monographs often fail to engage adequately with other scholarly research on their subjects. Sbardellati, by contrast, integrates archival finds in the FBI files with astute analysis of other critical contributions in film history. His work also intersects with wider studies of media censorship, Cold War historiography, and discourses of neoliberalism, power, and containment. After the media storm generated by Ben Urwand's The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler, I risk repeating what other reviewers have said at perhaps too great length. Urwand's first book dramatically departs from accepted histories of this period by arguing that the rosy picture of Harry Warner and Louis B. Mayer secretly raising American awareness of the dangers of Nazism through films like Black Legion (1937), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Escape (1940), and Sergeant York (1941) was whitewashing the awful truth. In fact, he argues, the studio heads willingly collaborated with German officials to cut (read censor) their pictures to suit Nazi agendas. Urwand also departed from the research practices of many established names in this field by going to the National Archives in Washington, and further afield to Germany, to trace the remaining paper trail of the studios' foreign distribution offices. …

An Analysis of Historical Transformation of an IT Giant Based on Sound Strategic Vision

INTRODUCTION Company Background and IT Industry IBM is short for International Business Machines. It is also known as Big Blue. IBM is considered one of the world's biggest Information Technology Company. In the 2009 Fortune 500 list, the company is ranked 14th best company in the world. It also ranks as the 28th best of global companies on the 2009 Forbes Global 400 list. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure services, hosting services, and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. It is difficult to find a company that deals in so many areas. IBM faces intense competition from other major players in the industry such as Microsoft for desktop productivity application, Oracle for database products, and Cisco for cloud computing (IBM at 100, 2010). Even though being the second most profitable company in the world in 1990, IBM began posting considerable losses between 1991 and 1993. IBM lost a staggering $16 billion. Mainframe computers were the cornerstone of IBM till the '90s, which was the source of almost half of IBM's revenues. But at the time other companies such as Compaq and Dell gave priorities to interconnect mainframe, midrange and increasingly mobile personal computers with distributed data sources and applications that led to fewer sales of IBM's mainframe computers. The company was originally founded as the Tabulating Machine Company by Herman Hollerith; it was renamed and incorporated by Thomas J. Watson as IBM when Tabulating Machine Company was merged with International Time Recording Company and the Computing Scale Corporation in 1911. Presently, it is known as International Business Machine Corporation. IBM has operations in more than 170 countries; it has customer /client relationships with more than 219 companies such as 3Com, VMware, NVidia, and the like. IBM develops and manufactures information technology related products and services that help its clients to deliver business values and be more innovative. The company maintains its operations through its five key segments: Global Technology Services (GTS) unit, Global Business Services (GBS) unit, Systems and Technology unit, Software unit and Global Financing unit. Through the Global Technology Services unit, IBM provides critical information technology infrastructure services and business process services that help clients to integrate resources for continuous innovation. The Global Business Services unit provides professional consulting services and application outsourcing services which is intended to deliver business value for its clients. The System and Technology unit provides solutions for business clients that need advanced computing power and storage management. The Software unit provides middleware such as Web Sphere, Tivoli and operating systems that can be used to enhance the capabilities of a business's IT infrastructure. Additionally, the company assists its internal and external clients with financing through its Global Financing unit. IBM encourages people from diverse background to work for the company. It has employed 399,409 employees worldwide and five of its researchers have received Nobel Prizes. IBM reported revenue of $95.757 billion and total asset of $109.0 billion for full-year 2009. Samuel J. Palmisano now serves as the current President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM. The company is trading in New York Stock Exchange under the name of IBM (Bryan, 1990). Motivating Factors Under the leadership of Thomas Watson Jr., IBM became the leading player in the growing field of Information technology. IBM products such as its mainframe computers were universally considered as the best solutions to a variety of problems. The Company became so successful that it became the target of US Government's antitrust suits by the mid 1960s. IBM's domination started to dwindle from the early 1990s. …

Worldds Largest Airlines? Proposed Merger of US Airways - American Airlines

In the last several years, the U.S. airline industry has experienced both long-standing and novel challenges – fuel price volatility, limits to organic growth, pressures to expand globally, and slowing demand for air travel.In April 2012, US Airways announced a move to take over American Airlines, currently in bankruptcy proceedings. The merger would combine the fourth (American) and fifth (US Airways) largest airlines nationally, making US Airways-American the largest U.S. carrier.This is a project aimed to answer the following research questions:1. What is the role of federal authorities in reviewing merger proposals? 2. What is the impact of Bankruptcy of American Airlines?3. What are the defences against Anti-competitiveness of the merger?4. What is the effect of DOJ Anti-trust suit?