In this chapter, we address a number of foundational questions. What exactly are platforms? How do platforms relate to the various types of network effects? Importantly, do we need different tools to assess potential anticompetitive...
Legal decision-making and enforcement under uncertainty are always difficult and always potentially costly. The risk of error is always present given the limits of knowledge, but it is magnified by the precedential nature of judicial...
Part I of this Chapter examines the history of antitrust law to contextualize the current debate regarding the consumer welfare standard. It addresses the numerous legislative history arguments and examines the courts’ experience...
This Chapter begins by examining and exploring the theoretical and empirical limits of the possible bases of network effects, paying particular attention to the most commonly cited framework known as Metcalfe’s Law. It continues by...
Public policy toward innovation faces a trade-off: Increasing the compensation of successful inventors increases dynamic efficiency by spurring technological progress, but it decreases static efficiency by enlarging a wedge between price...
In this chapter, we discuss the role of big data in antitrust with a particular focus on the rise and success of large digital platforms—as the importance of data has caught the attention of various reports on the digital...
In this chapter, we address three issues relating to vertical mergers and antitrust: (1) incorporating the elimination of double marginalization into the analysis of the likelihood of a unilateral price effect rather than treating it as a...
Vertical restraints are contractual arrangements between firms at different levels in a supply chain (e.g., manufacturer and retailer, manufacturer and distributor, distributor and retailer) that are more complex than simple per-unit...
From the standpoint of competition policy, it might seem desirable to modularize competition to the greatest extent possible so that the best and cheapest products prevail at every stage of a production process and in every component of...
This chapter explores the interrelationship between these two basic provisions, both as a matter of general theory and through their development in case law over the past 130 years—which spans multiple eras of technological innovation....
