When Robert Bork’s magnum opus, The Antitrust Paradox, was published in 1978 it was reviewed by a generation of antitrust scholars who were comfortable with the idea that the antitrust laws were intended to be and should be enforced so as to further a number of diverse and sometimes...

A standard essential patent (SEP) may give the patent holder market power in the market for an input that technology manufacturers need in order to make their products compatible with each other. Several commentators have argued that, when a patent becomes part of a standard pursuant to an...

Behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to produce a body of evidence that individual choice behavior departs from that predicted by neoclassical economics in a number of decision-making situations. Emerging close on the heels of behavioral economics over the past thirty years has...

In the last several decades, scores of new competition laws have been adopted and National Competition Authorities ("NCAs") established around the world. No matter what the arrangement for initial review of the NCA decision or review of a trial court in a private action, there is always an upper...

The promotion of economic welfare as the lodestar of antitrust law -- to the exclusion of social, political, and protectionist goals -- transformed and gave intellectual coherence to a body of law Robert Bork had famously described as paradoxical. Welfare-based standards have benefitted...

The beginning of a shift toward a more regulatory and less litigation-oriented regime of antitrust enforcement was observable by the mid-1990s, if not earlier. The transition toward this more bureaucratic approach by antitrust enforcement agencies is the subject of our analysis. Consent decrees...

There is a significant industrial organization (IO) economics literature on the economics of innovation and intellectual property (IP) protection. As some courts and antitrust agencies have recognized, the IO economics toolkit for business arrangements (e.g., vertical restraints, tying and...

In the last several years, competition agencies around the world have imposed or considered imposing extra-jurisdictional remedies on patent holders, particularly owners of standard-essential patents (SEPs) upon which the patent holder has made a commitment to license on fair, reasonable, and...

In October 2016, the Federal Trade Commission released its long awaited case study examining the business practices of 22 Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs). One clear policy implication is that PAEs do not present an antitrust problem. While the study makes a number of interesting and potentially...

The Austrian Federal Competition Authority (AFCA) invited comment on its draft guidelines for exempting “sustainability agreements” from condemnation under Austrian competition law. That law recently changed, allowing a specific exemption for otherwise anticompetitive horizontal agreements...