It is common ground that antitrust is designed to keep out of private hands unregulated power to control prices, to exclude competition, or to impede or distort the functioning of competition.
Antitrust seeks to achieve these goals by outlawing parti...
It is common ground that antitrust is designed to keep out of private hands unregulated power to control prices, to exclude competition, or to impede or distort the functioning of competition.
Antitrust seeks to achieve these goals by outlawing particular business practices that tend to generate undue market power or unfairly to suppress rivals' opportunities, by pursuing a policy of containment against non-competitive market structures, and rarely by resorting to drastic remedies that amount to dissolution of existing monopoly power.
For antitrust purposes, market power (monopoly power) exists whenever a business is able to escape the disciplinary effects of competition to a significant degree. Legal questions here combine aspects of conduct and structure, relating to unequal competitive potentials and their effects on competitive opportunities and incentives.
The question of definition of relevant product and geographic market ( essentials to the measurement of market power) is about as confused as any area in antitrust. Indeed, there is the question whether market power can be meaningfully measured in terms of relevant product and geographic market.
Market power cannot be imputed from "concentration" or size differntials among competitors, but must consider other dimensions of market structure; e.g. the nature of the product, the competence of buyers, the degree of market power in the hands of buyers, the structure of costs, etc. The existence of market power is largely evidenced by the competitive strategies pursued by a business.
Competitors can be injured by the monopolist’s efficiency. For example, the monopolist that engages in aggressive research and development win exclude competitors by making it more difficult for them to compete. This is injury to competitors, however, and not injury to competition. Injury to competition occurs when a practice is exclusionary and it produces no efficiency gains to the monopolist. In the Grinnell case, the Supreme Court stated that the offense of monopolization requires some showing of intent. However, the intent may be inferred from the exclusionary practices themselves.
The following exclusionary practices have been alleged by plaintiffs or found by courts to be sufficient to condemn a defendant of monopolization: a) Predatory Pricing, b) Mergers to Monopoly, c) Purchase and Shutdown of Rivals' Plants, d) Expansion of Output or Capacity, e) Price Discrimination, f) Vertical Integration, g) Price and Supply Squeezes which occur when a vertically integrated monopolist sells to vertically related firms at a high price, but suppresses the output price in the market in which those firms sell. h) Tying Arrangements i) Predatory Research and Development and Failure to Predisclose Developments in Progress have been alleged by plaintiffs to be illegal, but courts have not yet condemned them. j) Patent Abuse including obtaining a patent by fraud, and perhaps the accumulation and non use of patents. The mere accumulation of patents by the monopolist is generally legal. k) Raising Rivals Costs that is, engaging in activity that makes it more expensive for the rival to do business and thus forces it to charge a higher price. l) Refusal to Deal With a Competitor can be illegal, according to the Aspen Highlands decision, if a dominant firm's motive in so doing is to injure the competitor substantially or drive it from the market. The court reiterated this position in the Kodak case, which involved an alleged attempt to monopolize by a tying arrangement that excluded competitors from the market for servicing Kodak photocopiers. m) Essential Facility Doctrine the owner or operator of an essential facility, such as a scarce resource or a natural monopoly facility may have an antitrust obligation to share the facility with a rival.
The rule of reason in monopolization cases is designed to enable the court to distinguish between exclusionary conduct that should be condemned and conduct which, while exclusionary, is efficient and should be approved.
Competitive practices are sometimes central issues in restraint of trade cases under Sherman Act, Section 1 and in monopoly cases under Section 2. In Sherman Act cases, competitive behavior may be used both to show intent and to identify the possession of monopoly power.
The specific provisions of Clayton Act, Section 3, relating to tying arrangements and exclusive dealing pose section 7's antimerger provisions. In merger cases, the change in market structure, the increase in concentration, etc. can produce anticompetitive effects only as the structural change leads to changes in competitive behavior.
Competitive behavior may be the sole issue in cases under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which forbids "unfair methods of competition in commerce, and unfair and deceptive acts or practices in commerce." Price discrimination under the Robinson-Patman Act is a particularly troublesome aspect of competitive behavior. Issues of competitive behavior may be central in patent cases.
In terms of their particular industry and market setting, businessmen should eschew strategies and tactics which distort the effective functioning of competition or which may lead to noncompetitive market structures. Business should continue search for effective competitive behaviors and for guidelines to distinguish permissible from impermissible competitive behavior.