Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog

U.S. Antitrust Economics Scholarship

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

This spring I am teaching a comparative and international antitrust law and economics seminar with my colleague and co-author Kyle Stiegert in our Applied Economics department.  The class has an eclectic mix of students.  Some are economics PhD students, others are JD and LLM students. Students have different levels of classroom and practical background in antitrust law and/or economics. Kyle and I have found that it is helpful to have both lawyers and economists in the same class to tease out different perspectives, presumptions and approaches for issues that both disciplines grapple to understand. We hope that this class will aid students to create effective policy solutions since outside the classroom lawyers and economists must interface regularly on antitrust. So far, the mix of backgrounds and approaches (we also have a former Taiwanese FTC lawyer in the class) has made for excellent classroom discussion. In trying to find a nice background literature review on U.S. antitrust for the class, I came across a new NBER working paper, entitled "Antitrust" by Louis Kaplow and Carl Shapiro that surveys the economics underlying antitrust.

ABSTRACT: This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of current economic knowledge and use that knowledge to critically assess central features of antitrust policy. Our objective is to foster the improvement of legal regimes and also to identify topics where further analytical and empirical exploration would be useful.

Budzinski on An International Multilevel Competition Policy System

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Issues of antitrust institutional choice are critical in an increasingly global environment in which conduct has effects across a number of different jurisdictions.  This is an issue of particular importance to me and I have a forthcoming working paper (up next month on SSRN) on this issue.  Oliver Budzinski of the University of Marburg has published a working paper entitled "An International Multilevel Competition Policy System" that attempts to address the global gap in antitrust enforcement.

ABSTRACT: This paper develops a proposal for an international multilevel competition policy system, which draws on the insights of the analysis of multilevel systems of institutions. In doing so, it targets to contribute to bridge a gap in the current world economic order, i.e. the supranational governance of private international restrictions to market competition. Such a governance can effectively be designed against the background of a combination of the well-known nondiscrimination principle and a lead jurisdiction model. Put very briefly, competition policy on the global level restricts itself to the selection and appointment of appropriate lead jurisdictions for concrete cross-border antitrust cases, while the substantive treatment remains within the competence of the existing national and regional-supranational antitrust regimes.

Deadline for Steiger Fellowship is this Friday, February 2

Posted by Shubha Ghosh

http://www.abanet.org/antitrust/at-law-student/at-js-project.shtml

FTC/DOJ Hearings on Sherman Section 2 Tour Arrives on the West Coast

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

The FTC/DOJ hearings on Sherman Section 2 have gone national.  Up until now, the hearings have been in DC.  In the first of two non-DC legs, the hearings (press release here) move to the University of California at Berkeley, Haas School of Business.  The hearings have an all star cast.  For those unable to make the hearing in person (don't worry- for those of us in the cold Midwest, the next stop on the hearings tour is Chicago), you can listen to the webcast here.

Jan. 30, 2007 Sessions

Business Testimony (9:30 A.M.–12:30 P.M. P.S.T.):                    

Michael D. Hartogs is the Senior Vice President and Division Counsel at QUALCOMM Technology Licensing.
    
David A. Heiner is the Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Antitrust at Microsoft Corporation.

Scott K. Peterson is Senior Counsel at Hewlett-Packard Company

Robert A. Skitol is a senior partner in the Antitrust Practice Group at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP (Washington, D.C.) and counsel to the VMEbus International Trade Association (VITA).

Business Testimony (2:00 P.M.–4:30 P.M. P.S.T.):

David A. Dull is the Senior Vice President of Business Affairs, General Counsel, and Secretary at Broadcom Corporation.

Michael E. Haglund is a partner at Haglund Kelley Horngren Jones & Wilder (Portland, Ore.) and counsel to Ross-Simmons.

Thomas M. McCoy is the Executive Vice President of Legal Affairs and Chief Administrative Officer at AMD.

Jan. 31, 2007 Sessions

Academic Testimony (9:30 A.M.–12:00 P.M. P.S.T.):                   

Aaron Edlin is the Richard Jennings Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Joseph Farrell is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Howard Shelanski is the Associate Dean and a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

Academic Testimony (1:30 P.M.–4:30 P.M. P.S.T.):                   

Timothy Bresnahan is the Landau Professor in Technology and the Economy in the economics department at Stanford University.

Richard Gilbert is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and the Chair of the Berkeley Competition Policy Center.

Daniel Rubinfeld is the Robert L. Bridges Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Carl Shapiro is the TransAmerica Professor of Business Strategy and Professor of Economics and the Director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

                  

Picker on Teaching Antitrust at the University of Chicago

One of the changes to the blog for 2007 is to add guest commentary from other academics on substantive antitrust/competition policy issues and on antitrust pedagogy. On the latter issue, we hope to have a number professors guest blog about their classes both large and small and to share their innovations in teaching. We begin with guest blogging from the home of antitrust innovation—the University of Chicago Law School. The Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog is pleased to introduce guest blogger Randal C. Picker. Randy is the Paul and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law at The University of Chicago Law School and Senior Fellow, The Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. 

Posted by Guest Blogger Randal C. Picker

Teaching Antitrust at Chicago

Danny was nice enough to ask me to do a post on how I teach Antitrust at the University of Chicago. This year, I am teaching three classes—Antitrust, Network Industries and Copyright—and one seminar, Antitrust and IP Policy. I think of Antitrust and Network Industries as a nice, somewhat integrated two-quarter—we do quarters at Chicago—sequence: Antitrust, a class on the regulation of artificial monopoly, and Network Industries, a class on the regulation of natural monopoly. (We also have a separate Telecommunications Law class and there is some overlap between that class and Network Industries.) The name of the seminar really should be Whatever Randy Wants to Read Right Now; last year, it was classics in the secondary copyright literature; this year it is recently published articles or draft articles on antitrust.

The Antitrust class is by far the largest of the courses, taught in our large auditorium-style classroom. (That was 115 students this year.) I think that the course is a pretty conventional if economically-driven antitrust course. I don’t use a casebook and instead use an edited set of materials (here and here). That gives me great flexibility, so I can easily make last-minute changes, but is also obviously something of a burden to update the materials each year.

As you will see on the syllabus, the course works off of the standard Supreme Court antitrust canon. Blasts from the past, such as Trans-Missouri, which I just can’t prevent myself from teaching given its historic role (Dennis Carlton and I explore that, among other things, in a paper forthcoming in an NBER volume on antitrust and regulation). I often teach cases that the Court has granted cert on—this year Twombly and Weyerhaeuser—or should have taken—like the Hatch-Waxman generic settlement cases (Valley Drug and Cardizem). The course also has a bit of an Antitrust/IP focus, which reflects the field itself but also my research interests (papers on Microsoft (here and here); Intel; and copyright and competition policy (here and here)).

From a teaching standpoint, the class is a mix of Socratic discussion and some lecturing on core economic concepts. I use PowerPoint to lay out the economics and the hypos for discussion and post different pre- and post-class slides (think with and without answers). I don’t intend the slides to be used by the students to prepare for class but instead expect them to form the basis for what we do in class. That means that I can, guilt-free, post the slides right before class starts and students can download them using the network connections in the classroom. Students like having a set of slides to work with in class, both for note-taking and to be able to look at a concept mid-class that I covered earlier that day. But I don’t want the “answers” available before class, as I do think that it is important to explore blind alleys. (Whether students pass the slides on from year to year I do not know, but I do take the slides down before each quarter starts.) On the last day of class, I do a review session and post an integrated set of slides for the quarter (a very fat file).

The Network Industries course is usually roughly 30-35 students. It is a toolkit course, meaning a course about different legal tools used to approach the regulation of natural monopoly. These days that usually has some sort of network, such as the grid for transmitting electricity, at its core, though I pick up other forms of interconnection as well. Again, no casebook, so edited materials, and the same pre- and post-class slide setup. The only teaching wrinkle this quarter is that I am using a class blog and am requiring my students to make five posts across the course of the quarter (and two comments per week). The blog will make up 25% of the grade. The idea behind the blog is to push students to explore ideas in the course outside of the crossfire of the classroom. It also means that we can add to the topics covered in the course. I try to pick up on the posts in class (since I am using PowerPoint, I have the laptop and projector anyhow, so all I need to add the blog to class is a live Internet connection (most days that works)).

That gets us to the Antitrust and IP seminar (20 students or so this year and links to the readings here). Usually seminars meet for weekly for one quarter; we are meeting instead every other week for two quarters. In contrast to Network Industries, where the blog is, if all goes well, a pleasant addition to the course, the blog in the seminar is central to the course. I used to have the students write relatively short reaction papers to the readings and used those papers as the basis for class discussion. I would slice and dice those papers into PowerPoint slides, pull up the paper in quotes in class, and have students talk about their papers. But the key problem with that is that the students didn’t have a good chance to read papers by other students in the class, and I thought that they would benefit from that.

Now we do all of that through the blog. The class is divided into four groups, each group is assigned a posting/commenting window, and groups rotate through the slots week by week. We then discuss the posts in our class meeting time, again doing so using a laptop projector and a live Internet connection to pull up the blog.

All of this content is open to the public and isn’t hidden behind a university password requirement. The blogs often replicate the Annie Hall/Woody Allen/Marshall McLuhan moment. In our first blog session in the seminar, we were reading a paper by Ken Heyer at the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. Ken jumped in with his two cents in the comments (and I think offered to hire each of the students at DOJ). Not a bad day’s work.

Leslie on The Anticompetitive Effects of Unenforced Invalid Patents

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

We have posted quite a bit in the past few weeks on the Antitrust-IP interface.  Along these lines, I just read a new paper posted on SSRN by Christopher Leslie of Chicago Kent entitled "The Anticompetitive Effects of Unenforced Invalid Patents" that may be of interest.

ABSTRACT: Antitrust law and patent law assume that an invalid patent cannot distort competition unless the patentee enforces the patent by initiating infringement litigation or explicitly threatening to do so. The Article argues that invalid patents can destroy competition - even without such enforcement efforts - by creating legitimate fears of litigation, increasing the costs of market entry, delaying market entry, scaring away competitors' customers and business partners, and deterring research. Despite the anticompetitive risks posed by invalid patents, neither patent law nor antitrust law does an effective job of ridding the marketplace of invalid patents. In particular, because antitrust law currently holds that a monopolist does not violate the Sherman Act unless it actually enforces its invalid patent, a monopolist with an invalid patent can improperly exclude competitors while not exposing itself to antitrust liability. Finally, the Article argues that eliminating the enforcement requirement from antitrust claims based on invalid patents would better accomplish the goals of both antitrust law and the patent system.

 

Do US Securities Laws Allow for an Implicit Antitrust Exemption?

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

The joint DOJ/FTC amicus brief for Credit Suisse v. Billing is available here. The Supreme Court can address an interesting question that often comes up between sector specific regulation and antitrust-- when is antitrust applicable and when as a matter of institutional choice may it yield more efficient outcomes.  Specific to this case is the question of when is there implied immunity from antitrust in securities regulation. 

Antitrust Modernization Commission Findings Are Out

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

This week starts off with a big bang in the world of U.S. antitrust.  The Antitrust Modernization Commission has released its tentative recommendations and an executive summary.    

Antitrust and Patent Settlements

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

A number of recent law review articles have covered patent settlement, for example here, here and here. This week, the FTC released its FY2006 report on pharmaceutical patent settlements.  In FY2006, a generic received a payment from a branded pharmaceutical in 14 of 28 final settlements.  This figure is up from 3 of 11 final settlements in FY 2005 and 0 of 14 final settlements in FY 2004.  To put in context, all of the FY2006 settlements occurred after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in F.T.C. v. Schering-Plough Corp., 402 F.3d 1056 (11th Cir. 2005).  In Schering-Plough, the 11th Circuit reversed an FTC decision that two settlements between generics and branded pharmaceuticals were a violation under the FTC Act.

 

Superprecedent....and Kryptonite

Posted by Shubha Ghosh

Wonderful thread at Truth on the Market sparked by my comments on the status of Dr Miles as superprecedent.  Two issues still floating: superprecedents in antitrust and the per se treatment of minimum RPM. 

As far as superprecedent goes,  there is an argument that the term applies only to constitutional precedents.  Justice Roberts, as far as I know, has not explicitly said so, but the examples he gives are constitutional.  Precedents on statutory interpretation may be more flexible and may  never become invincible.  On the other hand, Justice Roberts may have been talking about the integrity of the Court and that there are some precedents, whether constitutional or statutory, that are so well established and accepted, that the Court will lose credibility if they are reversed.  So was Justice Roberts using the concept of superprecedents to apply solely to the integrity of the Constitution or the institution that interprets it?  Discuss.

Let me assume that the Chief Justice was concerned with the integrity of the Court. His recent interview in The Atlantic Monthly seems consistent with that assumption.  What are the implications for antitrust?  I would argue that Socony-Vacuum, and its condemnation of price fixing and its broader statement that price competition is the central nervous system of the economy, constitute a superprecedent.  The promotion of price competition that leads to lower prices for consumers would arguably be a basic principle, a grundnorm, for antitrust law.  Under this view, reversing Dr Miles is not as simple as my colleagues at Truth on the Market suggest.  While my colleagues are correct that there are output expanding justifications for minimum RPM, there are other contractual measures to increase output that will resolve the free riding problems and increase output (territorial restrictons, requirements of minimum expenditures on service and quality, trademark law and policing).  So the question becomes: should the court countenance restrictions on price competition--establishing a floor on price--that have benefits which can be realized through non-price restrictions?

I can anticipate two objections.  First, Socony-Vacuum is about price fixing among competitors rather than price fixing imposed by a manufacturer on a retailer.   But there are output expanding benfits from so-called horizontal price fixing.  Price supports can have economic benefits but not as pronounced, admittedly, as those from minimum RPM.   Appalachian Coals is still good precedent for allowing price fixing in times of crisis, whatever that means.  Despite these potential benefits from horizontal price fixing,  the per se rule still stands with good reason.   A similar logic should apply to minimum RPM.  There may be output expanding benefits, but the question is whether these benefits could just as readily be realized through non-price restrictions.

Second,  the current asymmetry between the treatment of maximum RPM (rule of reason) and minimum RPM (per se) may , with its superficial inconsistency, seem to show a chink in the armor of the Court's integrity.   But a foolish consistency is the hobgoglin of little minds, with the emphasis on foolish.  Maximum RPM serves to check market power among retailers, market power that may in part be the product of territorial restrictions and intellectual property law.   Therefore, there is strong economic justification for RPM and more importantly, an output expanding result that cannot readily be obtained through non-price restrictions.  As noted above, minimum RPM has a different justification and can be mimicked through non-price mechanisms.

Now perhaps economics is the kryptonite for antitrust superprecedents.  Where appropriate,  fields outside of law should provide the kryptonite.  Remember the role of social science data in Brown to reverse Plessy.  But even when you expose Dr. Miles to the kryptonite of economics, I think it does still fly, perhaps not at the pace of a speeding bullet, but up, up and away nonetheless.

Truth on minimum RPM?

Posted by Shubha Ghosh

Great discussion on Truth on the Market about minimum RPM, in response to my original post last week.

Colorado repealing antitrust laws?

Posted by Shubha Ghosh

The following was sent to me by Andrew Oh-Willeke:

Colorado’s General Assembly is considering a law to repeal a significant chunk of its state anti-trust law.

http://www.leg.state.co.us/clics/clics2007a/csl.nsf/fsbillcont/4FBAC989995887B887257251007B610D?Open&file=1070_01.pdf

The background to this legislation was a 2006 court case that found that Colorado’s anti-trust laws prohibited grocery stores from selling gasoline below cost as an incentive to customers who made sufficient purchases in sufficient time periods.

Economic Analysis of Competition Practices in the EU and the US: A View from Chief Economists

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

In what looks to be an amazing conference, the Jevons Institute for Competition Law and Ecoconomics at  University College London will present "Economic Analysis of Competition Practices in the EU and the US: A View from Chief Economists" on February 21, 2007 from 6pm - 8pm.

Forum Moderator

• Amelia Fletcher, Chief Economist, Office of Fair Trading

Speakers

• Damien Neven, Chief Economist, European Commission
• Dennis Carlton, Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Justice
• Michael Salinger, Chief Economist, Federal Trade Commission

Given various differences in approaches on a number of substantive issues, this talk should be one of the must see events of the year. 

 

Private Rights of Action in the EU

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Private rights of action in antitrust are all the rage in Europe. Few such suits have been brought thus far. However, there are a number of interesting developments that make a shift towards greater use more likely. The European Commission recently put up for tender a study on private rights in antitrust. This follows a 2005 proposal by the European Commission to reform the current legal system to facilitate private antitrust litigation.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported (subscription required) that US antitrust plaintiff’s firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll will be opening a London office this month. The WSJ states that other firms are expanding their London based practices in anticipation of more private antitrust litigation.

Out this week on SSRN is a timely paper by Ilya Segal of Stanford and Michael Whinston of Northwestern, entitled Public vs. Private Enforcement of Antitrust Law: A Survey.   This paper adds to the existing literature by providing a discussion of the economic issues regarding public vs. private enforcement and the economic literature that pertains to it.

Also getting in on the debate is Terry Calvani of Freshfields.  Terry is one of the true gems of the antitrust community and along with Bill Kovacic one of the most engaging people to hear live on competition policy issues (does this make them the Bruce Springsteen of the antitrust world?).  Terry will be giving a series of lectures at the Oxford Competition Policy Centre in the UK in April on this and related topics (criminal sanctions for competition offences and private enforcement of antitrust).  This follows a similar set of lectures last year at Oxford for Terry.   

SSRN TOP 10 Most Downloaded Papers for Antitrust Law & Policy

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

SSRN TOP 10 Papers for Antitrust Law & Policy (posted between November 17, 2006 and January 16, 2007)

1. Cartel Fines in Europe - Law, Practice and Deterrence, Cento Veljanovski

2 . Technical Assistance for Law & Economics: An Empirical Analysis in Antitrust/Competition Policy, Michael W. Nicholson, D. Daniel Sokol, Kyle W. Stiegert

3. Antitrust Analysis of Bundled Discounts, Thomas Andrew Lambert

4. Can Standard-Setting Lead to Exploitative Abuse? A Dissonant View on Patent Hold-Up, Royalty Stacking and the Meaning of FRAND, Damien Geradin, Miguel Rato

5. Engineering a Deal: Toward a Private Ordering Solution to the Anticommons Problem, F. Scott Kieff, Troy A. Paredes

6. Google Book Search and Fair Use: iTunes for Authors, or Napster for Books?, Hannibal Travis

7. Antitrust Around the World: An Empirical Analysis of the Scope of Competition Laws and their Effects, Keith N. Hylton, Fei Deng

8. An Instrumental Approach to Market Power, Jeffrey Lynch Harrison

9. The Nature of the Public Utility: Infrastructure, the Market, and the Law, Jim Chen

10. Review of Hovenkamp: 'The Antitrust Enterprise: Principle and Execution', Randal C. Picker

 

Antitrust and the Judiciary: An Israeli Perspective

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

The judiciary is an often overlooked part of the larger antitrust system. The judiciary is a separate antitrust institution because of its role in the implementation of competition through judicial review of agency determinations, whether those of sector regulators or an antitrust agency. Agencies that have spent significant time and resources in identifying anti-competitive conduct, investigating and prosecuting such conduct can have their actions second guessed by adjudicators. The judiciary therefore has powers to ensure that agency actions are upheld and enforced through the collection of penalties. A system in which the judiciary acts as a bottleneck to enforcement creates a situation in which effectively condones anti-competitive conduct.

In both civil and common law systems, the judiciary plays a key role in implementing laws by providing for the scope and coverage of the antitrust law. It also exercises review of the enforcement actions of the antitrust agency or sector regulator.  In this sense, the judiciary may be the most important institutional capacity in a given country after the antitrust agency itself given the power of the courts to support or stymie antitrust through their review of agency actions.

In an excellent new paper, David Gilo of Tel Aviv University Law School (forthcoming in the Israel Law Review) examines the lack of economic analysis in Israel by courts and agencies in restraint cases. On the topic of Israel and antitrust, this week marks an important conference on the future of Israeli antitrust.

Download israeli_antitrust.pdf

Top Antitrust Law Firms in the World

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

The Global Competition Review just released its annual GCR Top 100 -- its ranking of the Top 100 law firms in the world based on the strength of their antitrust practices.  Topping this year's chart is Howrey.

Thoughts on Microsoft

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Classes at Wisconsin begin on Tuesday, which is also the first meeting of my seminar on international and comparative antitrust.  One class will focus on comparative Microsoft cases in the US, EU, Japan and Korea.  Just as I thought that the scholarship on the US Microsoft saga was complete (and my syllabus set), Harry First and Andy Gavil have just posted an excellent working paper on SSRN that provides an interesting and heretofore unexplored angle.

"Re-Framing Windows: The Durable Meaning of the Microsoft Antitrust Litigation"
NYU Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 06-39
NYU Law and Economics Research Paper No. 06-55
Utah Law Review, 2006
 
ABSTRACT: The success, failure, and durable meaning of major antitrust cases often turn on how they are framed before the courts and the public. In the Microsoft monopolization litigation, the government plaintiffs framed the case as one in which Microsoft sought to extinguish the threat to its Windows monopoly with a comprehensive strategy of using monopoly power to exclude potential rivals, rather than succeeding through superior products. In decided contrast, Microsoft argued that the government plaintiffs, acting at the behest of losing competitors, were attempting to interfere with a dynamic and continually evolving industry, one in which Microsoft actually faced potent competitive threats.

For a time the plaintiffs' narrative was ascendant. The narrative began to lose ground, however, when a new administration took office in Washington and settled the case on terms that were unlikely to bring competition to the market in which Microsoft had improperly maintained its monopoly. The re-framing of the Windows case was underway. In this article we trace the reframing process. We begin by reviewing the original trial and appellate court decisions, upholding the core of the plaintiffs' case. We show how the seeds for reframing, planted in the court of appeals' decision, were subsequently used by the Justice Department to justify a settlement. We then review the settlement decree's administration to demonstrate how disappointing its results have been. Indeed, the government that once prosecuted Microsoft has now come full circle to defend many of Microsoft's core business strategies and to criticize antitrust enforcement agencies elsewhere in the
world that are still attempting to stop Microsoft's exclusionary conduct. As Microsoft has been reframed, the case has thus become a vehicle for redirecting antitrust doctrine and enforcement away from the problems of monopoly, especially in the new economy, in part by demeaning the value of government antitrust enforcement.

The history of the public prosecution of Microsoft reminds us that major monopolization cases are important to bring but politically difficult to manage to successful conclusion. If the effort to reframe the Microsoft case succeeds, our concern is that the already limited public power available to pursue private power in the public interest will be circumscribed and the historic role of the government to challenge competition-related abuses of private power may be crippled.

Update- January 15

Harry First has alerted me to another Microsoft article of his, this one forthcoming in the Wisconsin Law Review.  Extra points for publishing with  UW!

Download hfirst_microsoft_and_the_evolution_of_the_intellectual_property_concept_print_version.pdf

Introducing New Co-Blogger

Posted by Shubha Ghosh

It is with great pleasure that I introduce my new co-blogger, D. Daniel Sokol, currently a Hastie Fellow at The University of Wisconsin Law School.   Danny is a productive and engaging scholar with a great academic and  practice background.    He also has many fantastic ideas to increase the profile of the blog, including changing the name to Antitrust and Competition Policy (we hope, starting next week).  Please welcome Danny and follow the progress of the new and improved blog!

Baker and Pitofsky on Staples/Office Depot

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Jonathan Baker and Robert Pitofsky have just posted an article on SSRN regarding the story behind the Staples/Office Depot case, arguably one of the crown jewels of the Pitofsky FTC period.

ABSTRACT: This book chapter (forthcoming in Antitrust Stories) tells the story of the FTC's successful 1997 effort to block the proposed Staples/Office Depot merger. It describes the competing presentations of the FTC and the merging firms during the preliminary injunction hearing and places that trial in a broader context.