Reconciling the Conflicting Views of the DOJ Report on Single-Firm Conduct

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Luke Froeb (Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management) & Pingping Shan (ERS Group) present Reconciling the Conflicting Views of the DOJ Report on Single-Firm Conduct.

ABSTRACT: The U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) report, Competition and Monopoly: Single-Firm Conduct Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act (“DOJ Report”) is either (1) an extraordinarily useful and well written summary of the legal and economic analyses in the most difficult and contentious area of antitrust or (2) a set of standards that makes it nearly impossible to bring a monopolization case.

In this essay, we attempt to: (1) reconcile the competing views of the report; (2) understand how the agencies’ common attempt to achieve a more uniform guidance on enforcement instead illuminated the differences between them; and (3) try to determine what this state of affairs means for policy.