Jonathan B. Baker

American University | AU

The article explains why regressions of price on HHI should not be used in merger review. Both price and HHI are equilibrium outcomes determined by demand, supply, and the factors that drive them. Thus, a regression of price on the HHI does not recover a causal effect that could inform the likely competitive effects of a merger. Nonetheless, econom...

When the 1968 Merger Guidelines were drafted, both the economics and antitrust literatures addressed how competition could be softened when oligopolists anticipated the natural and predictable responses of their rivals to their competitive moves, such as price cuts or output expansion. But when economists developed new models of oligopoly behavior,...

The article is publicly available at this link, https://academic.oup.com/antitrust/article/10/2/248/6594396?searchresult=1.

"Most Favored Nation" contractual provisions have come under scrutiny in recent years by antitrust authorities in both the US and EU. MFNs are a type of vertical agreement between suppliers and buyers. The literature has recognized that there may be efficiency rationales for these arrangements but the literature has also recognized that these arran...

This article examines the roles of economics and politics in U.S. antitrust from several perspectives. It explains why the modern debate over the economic welfare standard that enforcers and courts should pursue is unsatisfying. It connects economics and politics by describing antitrust’s economic goals as the product of a mid-20th century politica...

A contemporary consensus in antitrust discourse inappropriately places exclusionary conduct at the periphery of competition policy, while putting collusion at the core. Contrary to that common view, exclusion is as important as collusion as a matter of precedent, the structure of doctrinal rules, economics, and sound competition policy. Courts trea...

This brief comment responds to the analysis of Obama administration merger policy in Daniel A. Crane, Has the Obama Justice Department Reinvigorated Antitrust Enforcement? 65 STAN. L. REV. ONLINE 13 (2012).

The past year in economics at the Federal Communications Commission focused on protecting competition in developing online markets. Our review discusses important economic issues that are raised by the FCC’s Open Internet rulemaking (which is commonly referred to as “net neutrality”) and its review of Comcast’s programming joint venture with Genera...

This article addresses the application of the economic literature on merger simulation to the practical context of antitrust enforcement. It highlights the value of simple simulations as a basis for creating screens and presumptions – particularly the gross upward pricing pressure index for the preliminary review of unilateral effects among sellers...

The FCC’s analysis of the Comcast-NBCU transaction fills a gap in the contemporary treatment of vertical mergers by providing a roadmap for courts and litigants addressing the possibility of anticompetitive exclusion. The FCC identified the factors any judicial or administrative tribunal would likely consider today in analyzing whether a vertical m...

The past year in economics at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has focused on encouraging the adoption and deployment of high capacity Internet access and the associated networks, commonly termed “broadband.” Our article sketches important economic themes in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan to show how the application of basic principle...

This comment explains how and why sector-specific enforcement by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) complements generalist competition enforcement by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to the benefit of competition in the communications industry. It illustrates ways in which a...

This handbook chapter appears in Antitrust Law & Economics (Keith Hylton, ed. 2010). It describes the role of market concentration in the legal framework for the antitrust review of horizontal mergers and evaluates the extent to which modern economic analysis supports a role for concentration in that review. The chapter examines market definition,...

The antitrust rules governing exclusionary conduct by dominant firms are among the most controversial in U.S. competition policy. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, they were debated in three arenas, involving legal policy, economic policy, and politics. In each arena, the dispute mainly arose as criticism of traditional standards...

This chapter has been prepared for inclusion in the RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON THE ECONOMICS OF ANTITRUST LAW (Einer Elhauge, ed.). It first explains why unilateral effects may result from horizontal mergers, and then describes several key models that have been developed to gauge the likelihood and/or magnitude of unilateral effects, focusing on mergers...

The signatories to this document are economists who have studied telecommunications, auctions, and competition policy. While we may disagree about the stimulus package, we believe that it is important to implement mechanisms that make stimulus spending as efficient as possible. To that end, we have come together to encourage the National Telecommun...

This comment critically evaluates Evans and Hylton’s defense of Justice Scalia’s legal and economic claims, and the policy implication drawn by Assistant Attorney General Barnett. It shows, first, that the legal claim is at best only partially correct, as the conduct requirement for the monopolization offense was importantly prompted...

Over the past forty years, there has been a remarkable transformation in horizontal merger enforcement in the United States. With no change in the underlying statute, the Clayton Act, there has been a dramatic decline in the weight given to market concentration by the federal courts and by the federal antitrust agencies. Increasing weight has been...

Over the past forty years, there has been a remarkable transformation in horizontal merger enforcement in the United States. With no change in the underlying statute, the Clayton Act, there has been a dramatic decline in the weight given to market concentration by the federal courts and by the federal antitrust agencies. Increasing weight has been...

The relationship between competition and innovation is the subject of a familiar controversy in economics, between the Schumpeterian view that monopolies favor innovation and the opposite view, often associated with Kenneth Arrow, that competition favors innovation. Taking their cue from this debate, some commentators reserve judgment as to whether...

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.

This essay surveys important issues in antitrust market definition. It identifies settings in which market definition is useful, and evaluates methods of defining markets. It considers whether markets should be defined with respect to demand substitution only or whether supply substitution also should count. It addresses practical issues in definin...

This paper addresses an important aspect of the interdisciplinary collaboration between law and economics: the use antitrust courts can and should make of empirical industrial organization economics, in light of the expansion of empirical knowledge generated during the last few decades. First we show how courts can apply what economists have learne...

In 1997, the US Federal Trade Commission challenged the proposed merger of two office supply superstores, Staples and Office Depot in US District Court. Both the government and merging parties presented econometric studies examining the merger's likely impact on consumer pricing, predicting a price increase of 8.6% and 0.9% respectively. This artic...

Competition policy in the U.S. may be understood as a self-enforcing political bargain emerging from a repeated political interaction between two large and diffuse interest groups, consumers and producers. Absent such a bargain, regulatory policy would fluctuate between pro-producer policies that tolerate the exercise of market power and pro-consum...

Econometrics played a major role in the investigation and litigation of the Federal Trade Commission's successful challenge to the proposed merger between two office superstore chains, Staples and Office Depot. Our goal in writing this essay is to describe the econometric issues at stake in evaluating the FTC's central claim that the price charged...

A firm that discriminates in prices faces a downward sloping demand curve, and thus could potentially raise price by reducing output. For this reason, evidence of price discrimination is relevant to assessing the possibility of market power, as antitrust law has long recognized. But price discrimination can be beneficial as well as harmful, and can...

This paper provides evidence of the necessity and success of antitrust enforcement. It begins with examples of socially beneficial antitrust challenges by the federal antitrust agencies to price-fixing and other forms of collusion; to mergers that appear likely to harm competition; and to monopolists that use anticompetitive exclusionary practices...

Antitrust law has long been concerned that the loss of a firm, through merger or exclusion, may improve the prospects for tacit or express collusion in a concentrated market. In merger law, this perspective has been codified as a presumption of anticompetitive effect arising from high and increasing market concentration. Antitrust law’s structural...

Three broad eras have characterized antitrust interpretation in the United States: a classical era around the end of the 19th Century, a structural era around the middle of the 20th Century, and a Chicago school perspective characterizing the last quarter of the 20th Century. This essay examines that history, asks why antitrust doctrine changes ove...

Econometric evidence played an important part in the litigation of the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC's) successful challenge to the proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot. In this article, the author describes the motivation and methods behind the FTC's econometric analyses of pricing. He also sets forth lessons for the process of relying on...

This article highlights recent developments in antitrust economics that have influenced the way the federal antitrust enforcement agencies analyze five issues: efficiencies from mergers, entry conditions, practices facilitating coordination, exclusionary practices, and the unilateral competitive effects of mergers.

This paper presents an econometric technique for estimating the single firm residual demand curve that does not require the estimation of demand cross-elasticities. The technique is particularly suited for the estimation of firm market power in product differentiated industries, where cross-elasticities are notoriously difficult to measure. One est...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

Two recent district court opinions consider whether affiliations among hospitals, doctors and health insurers--through contract or ownership--violate the antitrust laws. This Article applies a raising rivals' costs framework to the facts of those cases in order to assess whether the practices at issue were unreasonable.