Zeke Emanuel on the ACA’s Adverse Selection Problem and Solutions to It

Thom Lambert —  7 May 2013 — 2 Comments

Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s brother and former health care adviser to President Obama, acknowledges in today’s Wall Street Journal that adverse selection may prove to be a “bump in the road” in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  But never you mind.  He’s got solutions.  And, as usual, they all come down to messaging.

Emanuel describes the ACA’s adverse selection problem in what are, for this Administration and its surrogates, remarkably frank terms:

Here is the specific problem: Insurance companies worry that young people, especially young men, already think they are invincible, and they are bewildered about the health-care reform in general and exchanges in particular. They may tune out, forego purchasing health insurance and opt to pay a penalty instead when their taxes come due.

The consequence would be a disproportionate number of older and sicker people purchasing insurance, which will raise insurance premiums and, in turn, discourage more people from enrolling. This reluctance to enroll would damage a key aspect of reform.

Insurance companies are spooked by this possibility, so they are already raising premiums to protect themselves from potential losses. Yet this step can help create the very problem that they are trying to avoid. If premiums are high—or even just perceived to be high—young people will be more likely to avoid buying insurance, which could start the negative, downward spiral of exchanges full of the sick and elderly with not enough healthy people paying premiums.

Of course, Emanuel leaves out an important part of the story: the fact that the ACA itself encourages young, healthy people (the “young invincibles,” he calls them) to forego buying health insurance.  The statute does so by mandating that health insurance be sold on a “guaranteed issue” basis (meaning that insurance companies can’t deny coverage to people who waited to buy it until they became sick) and at prices based on “community rating” (meaning that those who are sick or susceptible to sickness can’t be charged more than the healthy).  Taken together, these provisions largely eliminate the adverse personal consequences of waiting to buy health insurance until you need medical treatment.  (You can’t be denied coverage or charged a higher premium reflecting your illness.)  They thereby decimate the incentive for young, healthy people to buy health insurance until they need it.  And since the law doesn’t (and can’t, according to the Supreme Court) require young, healthy people to carry insurance, many are likely to forego buying coverage in favor of paying a small “tax” — $95 in 2014, as opposed to the $2,480 out-of-pocket cost for an individual policy bought on a subsidized exchange by a 26 year-old earning $30,000.  As I have argued on this blog and elsewhere, the ACA is likely to generate a devastating spiral of adverse selection as the “young invincibles” drop out of the pool of insureds, causing premiums for the covered population to rise, encouraging even more of the marginally healthy to exit the risk pool, causing premiums to rise even further, etc., etc.

But don’t you worry.  Dr. Emanuel’s got it figured out.  He explains:

Fortunately, there are solutions [to this ACA-induced adverse selection problem]. First, young people believe in President Obama. They overwhelmingly voted for him. He won by a 23% margin among voters 18-29—just the people who need to enroll. The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy. Every commencement address by an administration official should encourage young graduates to get health insurance.

Second, we need to make clear as a society that buying insurance is part of individual responsibility. If you don’t have insurance and you need to go to the emergency room or unexpectedly get diagnosed with cancer, you are free- riding on others. Insured Americans will have to pay more to hospitals and doctors to make up for your nonpayment. The social norm of individual responsibility must be equated with purchasing health insurance.

Finally, and most important, we should adopt some of Massachusetts’ practices. When state officials in 2006-2007 were rolling out their exchange—called the Massachusetts Connector—they mounted a sustained campaign to encourage enrollment by young people. One aspect of the campaign focused in particular on young men, even heavily promoting the new exchange on TV during Red Sox games and hosting an annual “Health Connector Day” at Fenway Park.

So we’re going to lick this pernicious adverse selection problem by combining President Obama’s legendary star power with a dollop of good old fashioned shaming and some targeted advertising during baseball games?  One is reminded of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s 2003 statement that Americans should use duct tape to protect themselves from chemical weapons attacks.  But this is really worse.  The chance of a chemical weapons attack in 2003 was pretty small.  Insurance premiums’ rising as a result of ACA-inspired adverse selection, by contrast, is a near certainty. Let’s make sure we keep the President and HHS Secretary Sebelius on that commencement address circuit!

In health care, health care reform debate, politics, regulation, taxes
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Behavioral Merger Remedies and the Hippocratic Principle

Thom Lambert —  22 April 2013 — Leave a comment

Last Thursday, the FTC settled a challenge to a company’s acquisitions of two key rivals. The two acquisitions, each of which failed to meet the threshold for required reporting under Hart Scott Rodino, occurred in 2005 and 2008. Because the acquired companies have been fully integrated into the acquirer and all distinct operations have been shut down, it was impossible for the Commission to “unscramble the eggs” by imposing a structural remedy that separates the companies or parts thereof. The Commission therefore opted for a behavioral remedy — i.e., a list of restrictions on how the combined company may operate its business in the future. The purported goal of the behavioral remedy is to enhance consumer welfare by restoring competition that was destroyed by the anticompetitive acquisitions.

Commissioner Josh Wright took exception to a couple of the restrictions in the consent order. In a separate statement, he set forth a principle reflecting his concerns that antitrust implementation be both evidence-based and sensitive to error costs. One hopes that the principle he articulated — a version of the Hippocratic maxim, “First, do no harm” — will influence future FTC decisions on behavioral remedies.

The defendant here was Graco, the leading manufacturer of “fast set equipment” (FSE) used by contractors to apply polyurethane foams and coatings. The two companies it purchased, Gusmer in 2005 and GlasCraft in 2008, were its two closest competitors in the North American market for FSE. Graco’s acquisitions of those companies eliminated almost all market competition. In addition, Graco allegedly coerced and threatened FSE distributors so that they would not carry competitors’ products, and it filed a questionable lawsuit against a rival, Gama/PMC, causing FSE distributors to grow leery of that supplier and drop its products.  These post-acquisition actions have helped cement Graco’s market power by denying its actual and potential rivals access to the distribution networks they need to effectively market their products.

In light of Graco’s post-acquisition conduct, the consent order agreed to Thursday prohibits Graco from threatening, coercing, or retaliating against distributors who carry its rivals’ products.  It also requires settlement of the lawsuit that was impairing Gama/PMC’s access to distributors, and it forbids Graco from bringing a similar suit in the future.

But the order then goes further.  It prohibits Graco from entering into exclusive dealing contracts with distributors, and it places limits on Graco’s freedom to give loyalty discounts to distributors.  (Specifically, it limits the purchase and inventory levels upon which Graco may condition distributor discounts.)

The problem, in Commissioner Wright’s view, was that there was no evidence that these forbidden activities – exclusive dealing arrangements and loyalty discounts – contributed to the absence of competition in the FSE market.  Because exclusive dealing arrangements and loyalty discounts are usually procompetitive, prohibiting their use by Graco in the absence of evidence that they are responsible for the lack of competition in the market or are likely to be used to effect anticompetitive harm rather than to achieve a procompetitive benefit is more likely to hurt than help consumers.

Wright notes (and the Commission acknowledges), for example, that the market for FSE is precisely the sort market in which exclusive dealing arrangements achieve the procompetitive benefit of avoiding “inter-brand free-riding.”  Manufacturers of FSE will enhance total sales if they train distributors on the proper use and various complicated features of FSE.  Consumers benefit from (and sales are increased by) such training, because the distributors pass along their learning to end-user purchasers.  But if one FSE manufacturer trains a distributor on how to use the equipment, other manufacturers whose product is carried by that distributor won’t need to do so themselves.  The possibility that they will “take a free-ride” on the manufacturer providing the training tends to dissuade all manufacturers from providing such training, to the detriment of consumers.  Exclusive dealing helps out by preventing free-riding and thereby assuring a manufacturer that it will receive the full benefit of its training efforts.  By banning exclusive dealing, then, the Commission’s consent order may cause a consumer injury, and there’s no reason to take that risk absent evidence that exclusive dealing has been used – or is likely to be used in the future – to create anticompetitive harm.  First, do no harm!

It is important to note that not including exclusive dealing and loyalty discounts on the list of behaviors prohibited by the consent order would not give Graco free rein to use those practices in a manner that causes anticompetitive foreclosure.  The Commission or a competitor could always challenge a future exclusive dealing arrangement or loyalty discount if there were evidence that the practice had caused anticompetitive harm.  The remainder of the Commission’s behavioral remedy assures that there will be a viable competitor – Gama/PMC – that is in a position to challenge any such conduct, and, in light of the consent order, the Commission and any reviewing court would take any future complaints quite seriously.  Doesn’t it make more sense, then, to limit the behavioral remedy to actions that have contributed to the anticompetitive situation at hand and not ban behaviors that may well inure to the benefit of consumers?  As Commissioner Wright put it:

A minimum safeguard to ensure [that] remedial provisions … restore competition rather than inadvertently reduce it is to require evidence that the type of conduct being restricted has been, or is likely to be, used anticompetitively to harm consumers.

I think Wright’s right on this one.

In antitrust, error costs, exclusive dealing, federal trade commission, mergers & acquisitions, regulation
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Commissioner Wright lays down the gauntlet on Section 5

Geoffrey Manne —  16 April 2013

joshua-wright As Thom noted (here and here), Josh’s speech at the ABA Spring Meeting was fantastic.  In laying out his agenda at the FTC, Josh highlighted two areas on which he intends to focus: Section 5 and public restraints on trade.  These are important, even essential, areas, and Josh’s leadership here will be most welcome.

I’m especially encouraged by his comments on Section 5.  As readers of this blog know, Section 5 has been an issue near and dear to our hearts, and Josh’s intention to make it a centerpiece of his agenda at the Commission should come as no surprise. (There are too many posts on topic to link them individually here, but this link includes all our posts tagged with Section 5.  My own most recent discussion of the general topic (with Berin Szoka) is here).

Of perhaps greatest significance is this bit from Josh’s speech:

The Commission, however, has another choice available. It can and should issue a policy statement clearly setting forth its views on what constitutes an unfair method of competition as we have done with respect to our consumer protection mission…. I firmly believe this Commission is up to this important task and I look forward to working with my fellow Commissioners. In that spirit, I will soon informally and publicly distribute a proposed Section 5 Unfair Methods Policy Statement more fully articulating my views and perhaps even providing a useful starting point for a fruitful discussion among the enforcement agencies, the antitrust bar, consumer groups, and the business community.

This is great news, and I eagerly look forward to Josh’s proposed Policy Statement.  As Berin and I noted (and as others, including most notably Bill Kovacic, have noted, as well), this kind of guidance is sorely lacking and much needed:

Rather than attempting to do this in the course of a single litigation, the agency ought to heed Kovacic and Winerman’s advice and do more to “inform judicial thinking” such as by “issu[ing] guidelines or policy statements that spell out its own view about the appropriate analytical framework.”

Not surprisingly, my views line up with Josh’s, and his speech is full of important comments on the current state of Section 5 enforcement at the Commission. Of note:

(1) Objective evaluation of the historical record reveals a remarkable and unfortunate gap between the theoretical promise of Section 5 as articulated by Congress and its application in practice by the Commission;

(2) There is little hope for Section 5 to play a productive role in antitrust enforcement unless the Commission articulates in a policy statement about precisely what constitutes an unfair method, how the agency will decide whether to bring unfair method claims, and a general framework including guiding and limiting principles for evaluating Section 5 cases.

* * *

What does a frank assessment of the 100 year record of Section 5 tell us about its contribution to the competition mission? Or as I might put it, has Section 5 lived up to its promise of nudging the FTC toward evidence-based antitrust? I believe the answer to that question is a resounding “no.” There is no shortage of scholars and commentators filling the empty vessel of Section 5 with visions or further promise or purpose of, for example, creating convergence among international jurisdictions, shifting the attention of competition policy from economic welfare to consumer choice, or incorporating behavioral economics into modern antitrust. History, however, tells us that Section 5 has fallen far short of its intended promise. Section 5 has not produced more than a handful of adjudicated decisions with any durable impact on antitrust doctrine or economic welfare.

* * *

After one hundred years the balance of evidence more than suggests the Commission’s use of Section 5 has done little to influence antitrust doctrine and less to inform judicial thinking or to provide guidance to the business community. This void is not a small matter for an administrative agency whose institutional blueprint contemplated such a significant role for Section 5. In my view, it is the Commission’s duty to provide that guidance. But beyond our obligation as responsible stewards of the FTC and consumers through execution of our competition mission, there is considerable risk to the agency of continuing on its current path of putting Section 5 to use without providing guidance. I simply do not believe that path is sustainable or sound competition policy. Section 5 will not live up to its promise of offering an analytically coherent contribution to competition policy if the Commission continues not to offer guidance.

Focusing in particular on the problem of the currently unfettered Section 5 and how it might sensibly be circumscribed, Josh makes some great points:

First, Section 5 should not be used to evade existing antitrust law. Where courts have proven competent to evaluate a particular type of business conduct under the traditional antitrust laws, there is little reason for the Commission to step in under its unfair methods authority. This is especially the case when Section 5 is used to take advantage of a weakened requirement to prove consumer harm in the rigorous manner required in, for example, Section 2 cases. Evading the consumer welfare proof requirements of existing Sherman Act jurisprudence reduces the credibility of the agency, runs the risk that procompetitive conduct will be condemned under Section 5, and circumvents the healthy development of Sherman Act jurisprudence in the courts.

* * *

A second potential limiting principle is a restriction that Section 5 unfair methods cases – as is the case with invitation to collude cases – do not involve plausible efficiency claims. Not only does the lack of efficiency justification reduce any potential collateral consequences associated with false positives, but determining the presence of absence of cognizable efficiencies also plays to a core institutional strength of the Commission. The Commission’s learning and expertise in this regard has already influenced the evolution of the Merger Guidelines, and is applied on a regular basis.

I have no doubt Josh can and will deliver on his promise of working with the other Commissioners to bring some much needed sense to this problematic aspect of the FTC’s authority. This is an enormously important issue, one in great need of attention, and I can think of no one better than Josh to lead the effort to address it.

In antitrust, consumer protection, federal trade commission, regulation, Section 5 , , , , ,
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Commissioner Wright’s Speech at the ABA Antitrust Section’s Spring Meeting

Thom Lambert —  15 April 2013

Friday I discussed FTC Commissioner (and TOTM alumnus) Josh Wright’s speech at the Spring Meeting of the ABA’s Antitrust Section.  Wright’s speech, What’s Your Agenda?, is now available online.

As I mentioned, Commissioner Wright emphasized two matters on which he’d like to see FTC action.  First, he hopes the Commission will help fulfill the promise of Section 5 of the FTC Act by articulating an “Unfair Methods Policy Statement” that includes both “guiding principles for Section 5 theories of liability outside the scope of the Sherman and Clayton Acts” and “limiting principles confining the scope of unfair methods claims.”  Articulation of such principles would reduce the incidence of market power-enhancing conduct that could be difficult to pursue under the Sherman and Clayton Acts (the “guiding principles” would put firms on notice that such conduct is to be avoided), but they would also avoid chilling procompetitive conduct (the “limiting principles” would create zones of safety).  Giving guidance to business planners on what the FTC is likely to pursue — and what it’s not — would thereby enhance the effectiveness of the antitrust enterprise.

Commissioner Wright also stated his intention to utilize the FTC’s powers to pursue public restraints — i.e., output-limiting conduct authorized or required by governmental entities.  Wright explained:

An agency sensitive to efficiently executing its competition mission will look for low hanging fruit—in other words, it will identify and bring enforcement actions to prevent conduct that is clearly anticompetitive and thus bring immediate and certain benefits for consumers.

Public restraints upon trade represent precisely this type of increasingly rare low hanging fruit and, thus, should be a more central concern of U.S. competition policy. The legal hurdles facing enforcement against public restraints often render policy advocacy the primary weapon for the FTC in this area; and it is a weapon the FTC has wielded effectively and consistently over time. The FTC also has brought enforcement actions to challenge public restraints in recent years in appropriate cases. I support vigorous use of both tools….

I’m heartened by Commissioner Wright’s leadership on these matters and look forward to seeing how things develop at the Commission.

In antitrust, error costs, federal trade commission
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Some Thoughts on the Spring Meeting: Bummed About RPM, Happy About the FTC’s Future

Thom Lambert —  12 April 2013

I’ve spent the last few days in DC at the ABA Antitrust Section’s Spring Meeting. The Spring Meeting is the extravaganza of the year for antitrust lawyers, bringing together leading antitrust practitioners, enforcers, and academics for in-depth discussions about developments in the law. It’s really a terrific event. I was honored this year to have been invited (by my old law school classmate, Adam Biegel) to present the “antitrust economics” and “monopolization” sections of the Antitrust Fundamentals session. Former TOTM blogger (now FTC Commissioner) Josh Wright has taught those sections in the past, so I had some pretty big shoes to fill. It was great fun.

Two sessions yesterday really got my blood pumping, albeit for different reasons. The first was a session on counseling clients on RPM after Leegin. Leegin, of course, was the 2007 Supreme Court decision overruling the 1911 Dr. Miles precedent that declared minimum resale price maintenance (RPM) to be per se illegal. Post-Leegin, a manufacturer’s setting of the resale price its downstream dealers may charge is evaluated under the Rule of Reason, at least for purposes of federal antitrust law.

While it was a 5-4 decision, the holding of Leegin is hardly controversial among antitrust scholars. Chicago School and neo-Chicago scholars like myself, Harvard School scholars like Herb Hovenkamp, and even post-Chicago scholars like Einer Elhauge are in agreement that RPM is not always or almost always anticompetitive and thus ought to be analyzed under the Rule of Reason. (Indeed, Elhauge queried: “The puzzle is what provoked a vigorous dissent from Justice Breyer, one of the world’s most sophisticated antitrust justices…”). There’s simply no doubt about Leegin among those who have studied RPM most closely: it was correctly decided.

It was most disheartening, then, to hear a group of esteemed panelist opine that Leegin hasn’t really changed the advice one should give clients considering RPM policies. It’s still wise, the panelists stated, to advise manufacturing clients to avoid RPM and instead to implement either (1) so-called Colgate policies where the manufacturer simply announces and follows a unilateral policy of not selling to dealers who discount, or (2) consignment arrangements where the manufacturer doesn’t sell its product to dealers but instead enlists them as its sales agents and retains title to its product until the product is sold to the end-user consumer. The former approach avoids RPM liability because there is no “agreement” concerning resale prices; the latter, because there is technically no “resale.” Both approaches, though, involve costly and cumbersome methods by which manufacturers may exert control over the resale prices of their products. (See, e.g., golf club manufacturer Ping’s now-classic discussion of the difficulties involved in implementing a Colgate policy.)  So why counsel clients to adopt Colgate policies and consignment/agency arrangements when RPM is now adjudged under the Rule of Reason?

Because of the states — a number of them, at least. Maryland has adopted an explicit Leegin-repealer; California’s Cartwright Act uses language that appears to declare RPM to be per se illegal; and the Supreme Court of Kansas recently held that RPM is per se illegal under that state’s predictably unenlightened antitrust laws.  (Sorry Kansas folk. Proud Mizzou Tiger here.) In addition, a number of states lack statutes or court decisions harmonizing state antitrust law with federal precendents, and at least six have rejected certain federal precedents –chiefly, Illinois Brick – even without statutory repealers. How those states will treat RPM post-Leegin is anybody’s guess. (For an exhaustive and regularly updated list of state law treatment of RPM, see this helpful article and chart by Michael Lindsay.)

So what’s behind states’ hostility toward RPM?  At yesterday’s RPM session, California Senior Assistant Attorney General Kathleen Foote suggested that state attorneys general tend to oppose RPM because they are particularly concerned about consumer protection and because states have had actual experience with RPM under the so-called “Fair Trade” laws that for several decades allowed states to create antitrust immunity for RPM arrangements.  The empirical evidence of conditions under Fair Trade, Ms. Foote says, establishes that RPM leads to higher consumer prices and therefore tends to be anticompetitive.

But these arguments, each of which was considered and rejected in Leegin, have been soundly refuted.  A heightened concern for consumer protection in no way supports adherence to Dr. Miles, for manufacturers generally have an incentive to impose RPM only when doing so benefits consumers.  The retail mark-up — the difference between the price the retailer pays and that which it charges to consumers — is the “price” manufacturers effectively pay for product distribution.  Like consumers, they have no incentive to raise that price (i.e., to increase the mark-up through imposition of RPM) unless doing so generates retailer services that are worth more to consumers than the incremental retail mark-up.  Only then would RPM enhance a manufacturer’s profits, but in that case, it also enhances overall consumer surplus.  In short, manufacturer and consumer interests are generally aligned when it comes to RPM.

With respect to Fair Trade, Ms. Foote was playing a little fast and loose.  The Fair Trade laws did not, like Leegin, simply declare RPM arrangements not to be per se illegal; rather, they said that such arrangements were per se legal.  Hardly anyone doubts that RPM arrangements may sometimes be harmful and should be scrutinized.  But under Leegin – unlike under Fair Trade – anticompetitive instances of RPM (those that facilitate manufacturer or retailer collusion or serve as exclusionary devices for dominant manufacturers or retailers) may be condemned.  Thus, the fact that states witnessed consumer harm under Fair Trade’s regime of per se legality says nothing about how consumers will fare under Leegin’s Rule of Reason.

Finally, Ms. Foote’s reasoning that RPM is anticompetitive because the evidence shows it tends to raise prices is fallacious.  Of course RPM raises prices.  It is, after all, the imposition of a price floor.  But that price effect is beside the point.  Each one of the procompetitive, output-enhancing justifications for RPM assumes an increase in consumer prices.  The key is that the increase in retail mark-up will induce dealer services that consumers value more than the amount of the mark-up and will thereby enhance overall sales.  The fact that RPM raises prices, then, is a red herring.

If legislators, courts, and enforcement officials in states like California, Maryland, and Kansas can’t understand these fairly simple points (yes, I realize I’m asking a lot of the Kansans), then the promise of Leegin may go unfulfilled.  It was pretty clear from yesterday’s session that legal advice — and, accordingly, manufacturer practice — will look much as it did pre-Leegin unless the states get their act together.  That’s pretty depressing.

Fortunately, the session following the RPM session was a good bit more promising.  The highlight was a speech by FTC Commissioner Wright, in which he laid out his intentions to promote a more principled understanding of Section 5 of the FTC Act and to pursue the “low-hanging fruit” (his words) of public restraints.  Both developments would be warmly welcomed.

Commissioner Wright maintains that the promise of Section 5 (which enables the FTC, but not private parties, to enjoin unfair methods of competition that do not necessarily constitute antitrust violations) will remain unfulfilled until the FTC lays out the guiding and limiting principles that will govern its use of the provision.  He’s right.  Absent such articulated principles, use of Section 5 could well end up the way Robert Bork once described mid-20th Century antitrust, which he likened to a frontier sheriff who “did not sift the evidence, distinguish between suspects, and solve crimes, but merely walked the main street and every so often pistol-whipped a few people.” The evidence-based principles Commissioner Wright proposes to develop would avoid the frontier sheriff problem by bringing predictability and fairness to the Commission’s implementation of its Section 5 authority.

Even more exciting were Commissioner Wright’s remarks on public restraints.  Without doubt, competition-reducing laws and regulations are responsible for the destruction of vast amounts of consumer welfare.  State action immunity and other legal hurdles, though, make it difficult to police welfare-reducing public restraints.

But litigation isn’t the only weapon in the FTC’s arsenal.  As Commissioner Wright observed, the FTC is uniquely positioned to advocate for the removal of competition-destructive public restraints.  I was heartened to learn that the Commission recently helped persuade Colorado officials not to impose regulations that would have squelched Uber, a smart phone application that is creating much-needed competition in the taxi and private car service market.  It also took the side of the angels in St. Joseph Abbey case, helping to persuade the Fifth Circuit to strike protectionist regulations that reduced competition among casket sellers in Louisiana.  Commissioner Wright also noted that the FTC’s recent victory in the Phoebe Putney case, which narrowed somewhat the scope of state action immunity, will allow it to pursue more public restraints by state and sub-state governmental entities.  This all bodes well for consumers.

So here’s an idea for the FTC: How about using some of that advocacy prowess to convince the anti-Leegin states to bring their RPM doctrine into conformity with federal law?  It might be tough — and Kansas may be beyond help — but I’m confident that Commissioner Wright and his colleagues could help the anti-Leegin states see that they’re not helping consumers by clinging to moth-eaten Dr. Miles.  Instead, they’re just guaranteeing more jobs for lawyers charged with crafting and implementing Colgate policies, consignment relationships, etc.

In antitrust, consumer protection, markets, regulation, resale price maintenance
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How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing

Adam Mossoff —  5 April 2013

[Cross posted at the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property blog.]

Today’s public policy debates frame copyright policy solely in terms of a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” I recently posted to SSRN a new research paper, called How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing, explaining that this is a fundamental mistake that has distorted the policy debates about scholarly publishing.

This policy mistake is important because it has lead commentators and decision-makers to dismiss as irrelevant to copyright policy the investments by scholarly publishers of $100s of millions in creating innovative distribution mechanisms in our new digital world. These substantial sunk costs are in addition to the $100s of millions expended annually by publishers in creating, publishing and maintaining reliable, high-quality, standardized articles distributed each year in a wide-ranging variety of academic disciplines and fields of research. The articles now number in the millions themselves; in 2009, for instance, over 2,000 publishers issued almost 1.5 million articles just in the scientific, technical and medical fields, exclusive of the humanities and social sciences.

The mistaken incentive-to-invent conventional wisdom in copyright policy is further compounded by widespread misinformation today about the allegedly “zero cost” of digital publication. As a result, many people are simply unaware of the substantial investments in infrastructure, skilled labor and other resources required to create, publish and maintain scholarly articles on the Internet and in other digital platforms.

This is not merely a so-called “academic debate” about copyright policy and publishing.

The policy distortion caused by the narrow, reductionist incentive-to-create conventional wisdom, when combined with the misinformation about the economics of digital business models, has been spurring calls for “open access” mandates for scholarly research, such as at the National Institute of Health and in recently proposed legislation (FASTR Act) and in other proposed regulations. This policy distortion even influenced Justice Breyer’s opinion in the recent decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons (U.S. Supreme Court, March 19, 2013), as he blithely dismissed commercial incentivizes as being irrelevant to fundamental copyright policy. These legal initiatives and the Kirtsaeng decision are motivated in various ways by the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom, by the misunderstanding of the economics of scholarly publishing, and by anti-copyright rhetoric on both the left and right, all of which has become more pervasive in recent years.

But, as I explain in my paper, courts and commentators have long recognized that incentivizing authors to produce new works is not the sole justification for copyright—copyright also incentivizes intermediaries like scholarly publishers to invest in and create innovative legal and market mechanisms for publishing and distributing articles that report on scholarly research. These two policies—the incentive to create and the incentive to commercialize—are interrelated, as both are necessary in justifying how copyright law secures the dynamic innovation that makes possible the “progress of science.” In short, if the law does not secure the fruits of labors of publishers who create legal and market mechanisms for disseminating works, then authors’ labors will go unrewarded as well.

As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously observed in the 1984 decision in Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises: “In our haste to disseminate news, it should not be forgotten the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing a marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.” Thus, in Harper & Row, the Supreme Court reached the uncontroversial conclusion that copyright secures the fruits of productive labors “where an author and publisher have invested extensive resources in creating an original work.” (emphases added)

This concern with commercial incentives in copyright law is not just theory; in fact, it is most salient in scholarly publishing because researchers are not motivated by the pecuniary benefits offered to authors in conventional publishing contexts. As a result of the policy distortion caused by the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom, some academics and scholars now view scholarly publishing by commercial firms who own the copyrights in the articles as “a form of censorship.” Yet, as courts have observed: “It is not surprising that [scholarly] authors favor liberal photocopying . . . . But the authors have not risked their capital to achieve dissemination. The publishers have.” As economics professor Mark McCabe observed (somewhat sardonically) in a research paper released last year for the National Academy of Sciences: he and his fellow academic “economists knew the value of their journals, but not their prices.”

The widespread ignorance among the public, academics and commentators about the economics of scholarly publishing in the Internet age is quite profound relative to the actual numbers.  Based on interviews with six different scholarly publishers—Reed Elsevier, Wiley, SAGE, the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute of Physics—my research paper details for the first time ever in a publication and at great length the necessary transaction costs incurred by any successful publishing enterprise in the Internet age.  To take but one small example from my research paper: Reed Elsevier began developing its online publishing platform in 1995, a scant two years after the advent of the World Wide Web, and its sunk costs in creating this first publishing platform and then digitally archiving its previously published content was over $75 million. Other scholarly publishers report similarly high costs in both absolute and relative terms.

Given the widespread misunderstandings of the economics of Internet-based business models, it bears noting that such high costs are not unique to scholarly publishers.  Microsoft reportedly spent $10 billion developing Windows Vista before it sold a single copy, of which it ultimately did not sell many at all. Google regularly invests $100s of millions, such as $890 million in the first quarter of 2011, in upgrading its data centers.  It is somewhat surprising that such things still have to be pointed out a scant decade after the bursting of the dot.com bubble, a bubble precipitated by exactly the same mistaken view that businesses have somehow been “liberated” from the economic realities of cost by the Internet.

Just as with the extensive infrastructure and staffing costs, the actual costs incurred by publishers in operating the peer review system for their scholarly journals are also widely misunderstood.  Individual publishers now receive hundreds of thousands—the large scholarly publisher, Reed Elsevier, receives more than one million—manuscripts per year. Reed Elsevier’s annual budget for operating its peer review system is over $100 million, which reflects the full scope of staffing, infrastructure, and other transaction costs inherent in operating a quality-control system that rejects 65% of the submitted manuscripts. Reed Elsevier’s budget for its peer review system is consistent with industry-wide studies that have reported that the peer review system costs approximately $2.9 billion annually in operation costs (translating into dollars the British £1.9 billion pounds reported in the study). For those articles accepted for publication, there are additional, extensive production costs, and then there are extensive post-publication costs in updating hypertext links of citations, cyber security of the websites, and related digital issues.

In sum, many people mistakenly believe that scholarly publishers are no longer necessary because the Internet has made moot all such intermediaries of traditional brick-and-mortar economies—a viewpoint reinforced by the equally mistaken incentive-to-create conventional wisdom in the copyright policy debates today. But intermediaries like scholarly publishers face the exact same incentive problems that is universally recognized for authors by the incentive-to-create conventional wisdom: no will make the necessary investments to create a work or to distribute if the fruits of their labors are not secured to them. This basic economic fact—dynamic development of innovative distribution mechanisms require substantial investment in both people and resources—is what makes commercialization an essential feature of both copyright policy and law (and of all intellectual property doctrines).

It is for this reason that copyright law has long promoted and secured the value that academics and scholars have come to depend on in their journal articles—reliable, high-quality, standardized, networked, and accessible research that meets the differing expectations of readers in a variety of fields of scholarly research. This is the value created by the scholarly publishers. Scholarly publishers thus serve an essential function in copyright law by making the investments in and creating the innovative distribution mechanisms that fulfill the constitutional goal of copyright to advance the “progress of science.”

DISCLOSURE: The paper summarized in this blog posting was supported separately by a Leonardo Da Vinci Fellowship and by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The author thanks Mark Schultz for very helpful comments on earlier drafts, and the AAP for providing invaluable introductions to the five scholarly publishers who shared their publishing data with him.

NOTE: Some small copy-edits were made to this blog posting.

 

In copyright, economics, intellectual property, legal scholarship, markets, scholarship, SSRN, technology , , , , , , , , , ,
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Upcoming Teleforum: The State of the Patent System — A Discussion with Chief Judge Rader

Adam Mossoff —  2 April 2013

The State of the Patent System: A Discussion with Chief Judge Rader

A teleforum on Thursday, April 11, at 2pm. Hosted by George Mason Law School’s Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property Teleforum and the Federalist Society‘s Intellectual Property Practice Group.

Today, people read daily complaints about the “broken” patent system, and thus it’s unsurprising that there are numerous and wide-ranging attempts to “reform” the patent system. Legislative reform efforts include the proposed SHIELD Act, which would impose a losing-plaintiff-pays litigation system solely on patent-licensing companies and further revisions to the America Invents Act of 2011. Regulatory agencies also have skin in the patent reform game: the FTC recently reached settlements with Bosch and Google that restricted their rights to enforce their patents in standardized technology, and the FTC is currently considering whether to condemn the patent-licensing business model as “anti-competitive.” The courts are heavily involved as well: in addition to the many patent cases it has decided in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has four major patent cases on its docket this year, which suggests that it also agrees that the patent system is in serious need of legal reform. Yet, patents today secure innovation once imagined only as science fiction – tablet computers, smart phones, genetically modified seeds, genetic testing for cancer, personalized medical treatments for debilitating diseases, and many others – and these technological marvels are now a commonplace feature of our lives. This Teleforum with the Honorable Randall Rader, Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit – a digital “fireside chat” – will explore these and other issues in assessing whether the patent system is broken or whether it is fundamentally sound.

Featuring:

• Hon. Randall R. Rader, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit
• Moderator: Prof. Adam Mossoff, Co-Director, Academic Programs and Senior Scholar, Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, George Mason Law School

Agenda:

Call begins at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Thursday, April 11, 2013.

More information here.

In intellectual property, patent, truth on the market , , , , ,
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Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Partial De Facto Exclusive Dealing Claims Have Got to Go!

Thom Lambert —  27 March 2013

Today, a group of eighteen scholars, of which I am one, filed an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to review a Court of Appeals decision involving loyalty rebates.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently upheld an antitrust judgment based on a defendant’s loyalty rebates even though the rebates resulted in above-cost prices for the defendant’s products and could have been matched by an equally efficient rival.  The court did so because it decided that the defendant’s overall selling practices, which involved no exclusivity commitments by buyers, had resulted in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” and thus were not subject to the price-cost test set forth in Brooke Group.  (For the uniniated, Brooke Group immunizes price cuts that result in above-cost prices for the discounter’s goods.)  We amici, who were assembled by Michigan Law’s Dan Crane, believe the Third Circuit’s decision threatens to chill proconsumer discounting practices and should be overruled.

The defendant in the case, Eaton, manufactures transmissions for big trucks (semis, cement trucks, etc.).  So did plaintiff Meritor.  Eaton and Meritor sold their products to the four manufacturers of big trucks.  Those “OEMs” installed the transmissions into the trucks they sold to end-user buyers, who typically customized their trucks and thus could select whatever transmissions they wanted.  Meritor claimed that Eaton drove it from the market by entering into purportedly exclusionary ”long-term agreements” (LTAs) with the four OEMs.  The agreements did not require the OEMs to purchase any particular amount of Eaton’s products, but they did provide the OEMs with rebates (resulting in above-cost prices) if they bought high percentages of their requirements from Eaton.  The agreements also provided that Eaton could terminate the agreements if the market share targets were not met. Each LTA contained a “competitiveness clause” that allowed the OEM to purchase transmissions from another supplier without counting the purchases against the share target, or to terminate the LTA altogether, if another supplier offered a lower price or better product and Eaton could not match that offering.  Following adoption of the LTAs, Eaton’s market share grew, and Meritor’s shrank.  Before withdrawing from the U.S. market altogether, Meritor filed an antitrust action against Eaton.

Eaton insisted, not surprisingly, that it had simply engaged in hard competition.  It grew its market share by offering a lower price that an equally efficient rival could have matched.  Meritor’s failure, then, resulted from either its relative inefficiency or its unwillingness to lower its price to the level of its cost.  By immunizing above-cost discounted prices from liability, the Brooke Group rule permits and encourages the sort of competition in which Eaton engaged, and it should, the company argued, control here.

The Third Circuit disagreed.  This was not, the court said, a simple case of price discounting.  Instead, Eaton had engaged in what the court called “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  The exclusive dealing was “partial”  because OEMs could purchase some transmissions from other suppliers and still obtain Eaton’s loyalty rebates (i.e., complete exclusivity was not required).  It was “de facto” because purchasing exclusively (or nearly exclusively) from Eaton was not contractually required but was instead simply the precondition for earning a rebate.  Nonetheless, reasoned the court, the gravamen of Meritor’s complaint was some sort of exclusive dealing, which is evaluated not under Brooke Group but instead under a rule of reason that focuses on the degree to which the seller’s practices foreclose its rivals from available sales opportunities.  Under that test, the court concluded, the judgment against Eaton could be upheld.  After all, Eaton’s sales practices won lots of business from Meritor, whose sales eventually shrunk so much that the company exited the market.

As we amici point out in our brief to the Supreme Court, the Third Circuit ignored the fact that it was Eaton’s discounts that led OEMs to buy so much from the company (and forego its rival’s offerings).  Absent an actual promise to buy a high level of one’s requirements from a seller, any “exclusive dealing” resulting from a loyalty rebate scheme results from the fact that buyers voluntarily choose to patronize the seller over its competitors because the discounter’s products are cheaper.  In other words, low pricing is the very means by which any “exclusivity” — and, hence, any market foreclosure — is achieved.  Any claim alleging that an agreement not mandating a certain level of purchases but instead providing for loyalty rebates results in “partial de facto exclusive dealing” is therefore, at its heart, a complaint about price competition.  Accordingly, it should be subject to the Brooke Group screening test for discounts resulting in above-cost pricing.

The Third Circuit wrongly insisted that Eaton had done something more sinister than win business by offering above-cost loyalty rebates.  It concluded that Eaton “essentially forced” the four OEMs (who likely had a good bit of buyer market power themselves) to accept its terms by threatening “financial penalties or supply shortages.”  But these purported “penalties” and threats of “supply shortages” appear nowhere in the record.

The only “penalty” an OEM would have incurred by failing to meet a purchase target is the denial of a rebate from Eaton.  If that’s enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then any conditional price cut resulting in an above-cost price falls outside the decision’s safe harbor, for failure to meet the discount condition would subject buyers to a “penalty.”  Proconsumer price competition would surely be chilled by such an evisceration of Brooke Group.  As for threats of supply shortages, the only thing Meritor and the Third Circuit could point to was Eaton’s contractual right to cancel its LTAs if OEMs failed to meet purchase targets.  But if that were enough to make Brooke Group inapplicable, then the decision’s price-cost test could never apply when a dominant seller offers a conditional rebate or discount.  Because the seller could refuse in the future to supply buyers who fail to qualify for the discount, there would be, under the Third Circuit’s reasoning, not just a loyalty rebate but also an implicit threat of “supply shortages” for buyers that fail to meet the seller’s purchase targets.

This is not the first case in which a plaintiff has sought to evade a price-cost test, and thereby impose liability on a discounting scheme that would otherwise pass muster, by seeking to recharacterize the defendant’s conduct.  A few years back, a plaintiff (Masimo) sought to evade the Ninth Circuit’s PeaceHealth decision, which creates a Brooke Group-like safe harbor for certain bundled discounts that could not exclude equally efficient rivals, by construing the defendant’s conduct as “de facto exclusive dealing.”  Dan Crane and I participated as amici in that case as well.

I won’t speak for Dan, but I for one am getting tired of working on these briefs!  It’s time for the Supreme Court to clarify that prevailing price-cost safe harbors cannot be evaded simply through the use of creative labels like “partial de facto exclusive dealing.”  Hopefully, the Court will heed our recommendation that it review — and overrule — the Third Circuit’s Meritor decision.

[In case you're interested, the other scholars signing the brief urging cert in Meritor are Ken Elzinga (Virginia Econ), Richard Epstein (NYU and Chicago Law), Jerry Hausman (MIT Econ), Rebecca Haw (Vanderbilt Law), Herb Hovenkamp (Iowa Law), Glenn Hubbard (Columbia Business), Keith Hylton (Boston U Law), Bill Kovacic (GWU Law), Alan Meese (Wm & Mary Law), Tom Morgan (GWU Law), Barak Orbach (Arizona Law), Bill Page (Florida Law), Robert Pindyck (MIT Econ), Edward Snyder (Yale Mgt), Danny Sokol (Florida Law), and Robert Topel (Chicago Business).]

In antitrust, economics, exclusionary conduct, exclusive dealing, law and economics, monopolization, regulation, Supreme Court
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Mason LEC Program on the Consumer Financial Protection Board, May 2, 2013

Adam Mossoff —  26 March 2013

 

 LEC
In truth on the market
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Meese, Mellor & Rowes on Economic Liberty and the Fourteenth Amendment

Thom Lambert —  25 March 2013

“[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

These words from the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment lurk behind a great many news stories these days.  For the next two days, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether they guarantee a right to same-sex marriage (or, more narrowly, whether they preclude a state from banning gay marriage after it’s been permitted).  The Court will also consider whether similar words in the Fifth Amendment, which applies to the federal government, preclude Congress from denying same-sex married couples the rights that are available to other married couples under federal programs.  Just today, the Court announced that it will consider whether the words preclude a state, by referendum, from eliminating the use of affirmative action in higher education.

But do the words place any meaningful restrictions on regulations of purely economic activity?  For the last two-thirds of a century, most people have assumed they don’t.  Sure, economic regulations are officially subject to Fourteenth Amendment constraints.  But the “rational basis review” courts have applied in scrutinizing economic regulations has generally amounted to  a rule of per se validity.

As Alan Meese explains, a recent Fifth Circuit decision suggests that might be changing, if ever so slightly.  Conservatives may balk (e.g., “you can’t have Lochner without Roe!”), but, as Alan discusses, the Fifth Circuit’s scrutiny was far less stringent than that engaged in by the courts that struck down economic regulations in the so-called Lochner era.  As Chip Mellor and Jeff Rowes explain, it seems the Fifth Circuit was just doing its constitutionally assigned job here.

In constitutional law, free to choose
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