Thursday night I will be speaking at a dinner and discussion sponsored by the eSapience Center for Competition Policy (eCCP) on the pending Leegin decision and the application of per se rules to minimum RPM. Here is the eCCP announcement:
Presentations will be made by Prof. Robert Pitofsky, and Prof. Joshua Wright. Prof. Pitofsky is the Sheehy Professor of Antitrust & Trade Regulation Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and Of Counsel with Arnold & Porter LLP. Prof. Wright is is an Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, and has been recently appointed to the newly created position of Scholar in Residence in the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition.
I will be presenting the view that per se rules should not be applied to minimum RPM opposite Professor Pitofsky who has long been the most prominent champion of the per se approach. It should be fun!
*I should note that Thom, Geoff, and I are Advisory Board members at eCCP.
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I have read it. The brief spells out some of the costs to Ping of implementing its own pricing strategy through retailers under the current Colgate/ Dr. Miles environment. And no, I will not arrange to get anyone a copy, though I presume Professor Pitofsky is at least as well read on this issue as anyone else.
And as a side note, I dont think that the economists amicus brief in the case (as an example of what professors talk about) involves vague abstractions over real life issues. To the contrary, much of the brief focuses on empirical evidence that min RPM does not meet the per se standard’s requirement that a restraint always or almost always has an anticompetitive effect. The effects that the agreements have or do not have in the marketplace certainly qualify as real life issues, or so one would think.
Josh:
Have you read the Ping brief.
Can you arrange for Professor Pitofsky to get a copy.
I think the Ping brief outlines the dysfunctional. real life issues of the case. Not the ones that most professors talk about.
I think the Ping brief explains it.