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The Klobuchar Bill’s Not-So-Bright Lines for Antitrust Scrutiny

Eric Fruits & Geoffrey Manne —  20 July 2021

In a recent op-ed, Robert Bork Jr. laments the Biden administration’s drive to jettison the Consumer Welfare Standard that has formed nearly half a century of antitrust jurisprudence. The move can be seen in the near-revolution at the Federal Trade Commission, in the president’s executive order on competition enforcement, and in several of the major antitrust bills currently before Congress.

Bork notes the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would “outlaw any mergers or acquisitions for the more than 80 large U.S. companies valued over $100 billion.”

Bork is correct that it will be more than 80 companies, but it is likely to be way more. While the Klobuchar bill does not explicitly outlaw such mergers, under certain circumstances, it shifts the burden of proof to the merging parties, who must demonstrate that the benefits of the transaction outweigh the potential risks. Under current law, the burden is on the government to demonstrate the potential costs outweigh the potential benefits.

One of the measure’s specific triggers for this burden-shifting is if the acquiring party has a market capitalization, assets, or annual net revenue of more than $100 billion and seeks a merger or acquisition valued at $50 million or more. About 120 or more U.S. companies satisfy at least one of these conditions. The end of this post provides a list of publicly traded companies, according to Zacks’ stock screener, that would likely be subject to the shift in burden of proof.

If the goal is to go after Big Tech, the Klobuchar bill hits the mark. All of the FAANG companies—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly known as Google)—satisfy one or more of the criteria. So do Microsoft and PayPal.

But even some smaller tech firms will be subject to the shift in burden of proof. Zoom and Square have market caps that would trigger under Klobuchar’s bill and Snap is hovering around $100 billion in market cap. Twitter and eBay, however, are well under any of the thresholds. Likewise, privately owned Advance Communications, owner of Reddit, would also likely fall short of any of the triggers.

Snapchat has a little more than 300 million monthly active users. Twitter and Reddit each have about 330 million monthly active users. Nevertheless, under the Klobuchar bill, Snapchat is presumed to have more market power than either Twitter or Reddit, simply because the market assigns a higher valuation to Snap.

But this bill is about more than Big Tech. Tesla, which sold its first car only 13 years ago, is now considered big enough that it will face the same antitrust scrutiny as the Big 3 automakers. Walmart, Costco, and Kroger would be subject to the shifted burden of proof, while Safeway and Publix would escape such scrutiny. An acquisition by U.S.-based Nike would be put under the microscope, but a similar acquisition by Germany’s Adidas would not fall under the Klobuchar bill’s thresholds.

Tesla accounts for less than 2% of the vehicles sold in the United States. I have no idea what Walmart, Costco, Kroger, or Nike’s market share is, or even what comprises “the” market these companies compete in. What we do know is that the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission excel at narrowly crafting market definitions so that just about any company can be defined as dominant.

So much of the recent interest in antitrust has focused on Big Tech. But even the biggest of Big Tech firms operate in dynamic and competitive markets. None of my four children use Facebook or Twitter. My wife and I don’t use Snapchat. We all use Netflix, but we also use Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video. None of these services have a monopoly on our eyeballs, our attention, or our pocketbooks.

The antitrust bills currently working their way through Congress abandon the long-standing balancing of pro- versus anti-competitive effects of mergers in favor of a “big is bad” approach. While the Klobuchar bill appears to provide clear guidance on the thresholds triggering a shift in the burden of proof, the arbitrary nature of the thresholds will result in arbitrary application of the burden of proof. If passed, we will soon be faced with a case in which two firms who differ only in market cap, assets, or sales will be subject to very different antitrust scrutiny, resulting in regulatory chaos.

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in market capitalization

3MDanaher Corp.PepsiCo
Abbott LaboratoriesDeere & Co.Pfizer
AbbVieEli Lilly and Co.Philip Morris International
Adobe Inc.ExxonMobilProcter & Gamble
Advanced Micro DevicesFacebook Inc.Qualcomm
Alphabet Inc.General Electric Co.Raytheon Technologies
AmazonGoldman SachsSalesforce
American ExpressHoneywellServiceNow
American TowerIBMSquare Inc.
AmgenIntelStarbucks
Apple Inc.IntuitTarget Corp.
Applied MaterialsIntuitive SurgicalTesla Inc.
AT&TJohnson & JohnsonTexas Instruments
Bank of AmericaJPMorgan ChaseThe Coca-Cola Co.
Berkshire HathawayLockheed MartinThe Estée Lauder Cos.
BlackRockLowe’sThe Home Depot
BoeingMastercardThe Walt Disney Co.
Bristol Myers SquibbMcDonald’sThermo Fisher Scientific
Broadcom Inc.MedtronicT-Mobile US
Caterpillar Inc.Merck & Co.Union Pacific Corp.
Charles Schwab Corp.MicrosoftUnited Parcel Service
Charter CommunicationsMorgan StanleyUnitedHealth Group
Chevron Corp.NetflixVerizon Communications
Cisco SystemsNextEra EnergyVisa Inc.
CitigroupNike Inc.Walmart
ComcastNvidiaWells Fargo
CostcoOracle Corp.Zoom Video Communications
CVS HealthPayPal

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in current assets

Ally FinancialFreddie Mac
American International GroupKeyBank
BNY MellonM&T Bank
Capital OneNorthern Trust
Citizens Financial GroupPNC Financial Services
Fannie MaeRegions Financial Corp.
Fifth Third BankState Street Corp.
First Republic BankTruist Financial
Ford Motor Co.U.S. Bancorp

Publicly traded companies with more than $100 billion in sales

AmerisourceBergenDell Technologies
AnthemGeneral Motors
Cardinal HealthKroger
Centene Corp.McKesson Corp.
CignaWalgreens Boots Alliance
In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Credit Cards, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Google, Health Care, Law & Economics, Market Definition, Merger Guidelines, Monopolization, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Twitter , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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It’s All About What We Don’t Know

Doug Melamed —  12 October 2020
[TOTM: The following is part of a symposium by TOTM guests and authors marking the release of Nicolas Petit’s “Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario.” The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Doug Melamed (Professor of the Practice of Law, Stanford law School).]

The big digital platforms make people uneasy.  Part of the unease is no doubt attributable to widespread populist concerns about large and powerful business entities.  Platforms like Facebook and Google in particular cause unease because they affect sensitive issues of communications, community, and politics.  But the platforms also make people uneasy because they seem boundless – enduring monopolies protected by ever-increasing scale and network economies, and growing monopolies aided by scope economies that enable them to conquer complementary markets.  They provoke a discussion about whether antitrust law is sufficient for the challenge.

Nicolas Petit’s Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario provides an insightful and valuable antidote to this unease.  While neither Panglossian nor comprehensive, Petit’s analysis persuasively argues that some of the concerns about the platforms are misguided or at least overstated.  As Petit sees it, the platforms are not so much monopolies in discrete markets – search, social networking, online commerce, and so on – as “multibusiness firms with business units in partly overlapping markets” that are engaged in a “dynamic oligopoly game” that might be “the socially optimal industry structure.”  Petit suggests that we should “abandon or at least radically alter traditional antitrust principles,” which are aimed at preserving “rivalry,” and “adapt to the specific non-rival economics of digital markets.”  In other words, the law should not try to diminish the platforms’ unique dominance in their individual sectors, which have already tipped to a winner-take-all (or most) state and in which protecting rivalry is not “socially beneficial.”  Instead, the law should encourage reductions of output in tipped markets in which the dominant firm “extracts a monopoly rent” in order to encourage rivalry in untipped markets. 

Petit’s analysis rests on the distinction between “tipped markets,” in which “tech firms with observed monopoly positions can take full advantage of their market power,” and “untipped markets,” which are “characterized by entry, instability and uncertainty.”  Notably, however, he does not expect “dispositive findings” as to whether a market is tipped or untipped.  The idea is to define markets, not just by “structural” factors like rival goods and services, market shares and entry barriers, but also by considering “uncertainty” and “pressure for change.”

Not surprisingly, given Petit’s training and work as a European scholar, his discussion of “antitrust in moligopoly markets” includes prescriptions that seem to one schooled in U.S. antitrust law to be a form of regulation that goes beyond proscribing unlawful conduct.  Petit’s principal concern is with reducing monopoly rents available to digital platforms.  He rejects direct reduction of rents by price regulation as antithetical to antitrust’s DNA and proposes instead indirect reduction of rents by permitting users on the inelastic side of a platform (the side from which the platform gains most of its revenues) to collaborate in order to gain countervailing market power and by restricting the platforms’ use of vertical restraints to limit user bypass. 

He would create a presumption against all horizontal mergers by dominant platforms in order to “prevent marginal increases of the output share on which the firms take a monopoly rent” and would avoid the risk of defining markets narrowly and thus failing to recognize that platforms are conglomerates that provide actual or potential competition in multiple partially overlapping commercial segments. By contrast, Petit would restrict the platforms’ entry into untipped markets only in “exceptional circumstances.”  For this, Petit suggests four inquiries: whether leveraging of network effects is involved; whether platform entry deters or forecloses entry by others; whether entry by others pressures the monopoly rents; and whether entry into the untipped market is intended to deter entry by others or is a long-term commitment.

One might question the proposition, which is central to much of Petit’s argument, that reducing monopoly rents in tipped markets will increase the platforms’ incentives to enter untipped markets.  Entry into untipped markets is likely to depend more on expected returns in the untipped market, the cost of capital, and constraints on managerial bandwidth than on expected returns in the tipped market.  But the more important issue, at least from the perspective of competition law, is whether – even assuming the correctness of all aspects of Petit’s economic analysis — the kind of categorical regulatory intervention proposed by Petit is superior to a law enforcement regime that proscribes only anticompetitive conduct that increases or threatens to increase market power.  Under U.S. law, anticompetitive conduct is conduct that tends to diminish the competitive efficacy of rivals and does not sufficiently enhance economic welfare by reducing costs, increasing product quality, or reducing above-cost prices.

If there were no concerns about the ability of legal institutions to know and understand the facts, a law enforcement regime would seem clearly superior.  Consider, for example, Petit’s recommendation that entry by a platform monopoly into untipped markets should be restricted only when network effects are involved and after taking into account whether the entry tends to protect the tipped market monopoly and whether it reflects a long-term commitment.  Petit’s proposed inquiries might make good sense as a way of understanding as a general matter whether market extension by a dominant platform is likely to be problematic.  But it is hard to see how economic welfare is promoted by permitting a platform to enter an adjacent market (e.g., Amazon entering a complementary product market) by predatory pricing or by otherwise unprofitable self-preferencing, even if the entry is intended to be permanent and does not protect the platform monopoly. 

Similarly, consider the proposed presumption against horizontal mergers.  That might not be a good idea if there is a small (10%) chance that the acquired firm would otherwise endure and modestly reduce the platform’s monopoly rents and an equal or even smaller chance that the acquisition will enable the platform, by taking advantage of economies of scope and asset complementarities, to build from the acquired firm an improved business that is much more valuable to consumers.  In that case, the expected value of the merger in welfare terms might be very positive.  Similarly, Petit would permit acquisitions by a platform of firms outside the tipped market as long as the platform has the ability and incentive to grow the target.  But the growth path of the target is not set in stone.  The platform might use it as a constrained complement, while an unaffiliated owner might build it into something both more valuable to consumers and threatening to the platform.  Maybe one of these stories describes Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram.

The prototypical anticompetitive horizontal merger story is one in which actual or potential competitors agree to share the monopoly rents that would be dissipated by competition between them. That story is confounded by communications that seem like threats, which imply a story of exclusion rather than collusion.  Petit refers to one such story.  But the threat story can be misleading.  Suppose, for example, that Platform sees Startup introduce a new business concept and studies whether it could profitably emulate Startup.  Suppose further that Platform concludes that, because of scale and scope economies available to it, it could develop such a business and come to dominate the market for a cost of $100 million acting alone or $25 million if it can acquire Startup and take advantage of its existing expertise, intellectual property, and personnel.  In that case, Platform might explain to Startup the reality that Platform is going to take the new market either way and propose to buy Startup for $50 million (thus offering Startup two-thirds of the gains from trade).  Startup might refuse, perhaps out of vanity or greed, in which case Platform as promised might enter aggressively and, without engaging in predatory or other anticompetitive conduct, drive Startup from the market.  To an omniscient law enforcement regime, there should be no antitrust violation from either an acquisition or the aggressive competition.  Either way, the more efficient provider prevails so the optimum outcome is realized in the new market.  The merger would have been more efficient because it would have avoided wasteful duplication of startup costs, and the merger proposal (later characterized as a threat) was thus a benign, even procompetitive, invitation to collude.  It would be a different story of course if Platform could overcome Startup’s first mover advantage only by engaging in anticompetitive conduct.

The problem is that antitrust decision makers often cannot understand all the facts.  Take the threat story, for example.  If Startup acquiesces and accepts the $50 million offer, the decision maker will have to determine whether Platform could have driven Startup from the market without engaging in predatory or anticompetitive conduct and, if not, whether absent the merger the parties would have competed against one another.  In other situations, decision makers are asked to determine whether the conduct at issue would be more likely than the but-for world to promote innovation or other, similarly elusive matters.

U.S. antitrust law accommodates its unavoidable uncertainty by various default rules and practices.  Some, like per se rules and the controversial Philadelphia National Bank presumption, might on occasion prohibit conduct that would actually have been benign or even procompetitive.  Most, however, insulate from antitrust liability conduct that might actually be anticompetitive.  These include rules applicable to predatory pricing, refusals to deal, two-sided markets, and various matters involving patents.  Perhaps more important are proof requirements in general.  U.S. antitrust law is based on the largely unexamined notion that false positives are worse than false negatives and thus, for the most part, puts the burden of uncertainty on the plaintiff.

Petit is proposing, in effect, an alternative approach for the digital platforms.  This approach would not just proscribe anticompetitive conduct.  It would, instead, apply to specific firms special rules that are intended to promote a desired outcome, the reduction in monopoly rents in tipped digital markets.  So, one question suggested by Petit’s provocative study is whether the inevitable uncertainty surrounding issues of platform competition are best addressed by the kinds of categorical rules Petit proposes or by case-by-case application of abstract legal principles.  Put differently, assuming that economic welfare is the objective, what is the best way to minimize error costs?

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of error costs: specification errors and application errors.  Specification errors reflect legal rules that do not map perfectly to the normative objectives of the law (e.g., a rule that would prohibit all horizontal mergers by dominant platforms when some such mergers are procompetitive or welfare-enhancing).  Application errors reflect mistaken application of the legal rule to the facts of the case (e.g., an erroneous determination whether the conduct excludes rivals or provides efficiency benefits).   

Application errors are the most likely source of error costs in U.S. antitrust law.  The law relies largely on abstract principles that track the normative objectives of the law (e.g., conduct by a monopoly that excludes rivals and has no efficiency benefit is illegal). Several recent U.S. antitrust decisions (American Express, Qualcomm, and Farelogix among them) suggest that error costs in a law enforcement regime like that in the U.S. might be substantial and even that case-by-case application of principles that require applying economic understanding to diverse factual circumstances might be beyond the competence of generalist judges.  Default rules applicable in special circumstances reduce application errors but at the expense of specification errors.

Specification errors are more likely with categorical rules, like those suggested by Petit.  The total costs of those specification errors are likely to exceed the costs of mistaken decisions in individual cases because categorical rules guide firm conduct in general, not just in decided cases, and rules that embody specification errors are thus likely to encourage undesirable conduct and to discourage desirable conduct in matters that are not the subject of enforcement proceedings.  Application errors, unless systematic and predictable, are less likely to impose substantial costs beyond the costs of mistaken decisions in the decided cases themselves.  Whether any particular categorical rules are likely to have error costs greater than the error costs of the existing U.S. antitrust law will depend in large part on the specification errors of the rules and on whether their application is likely to be accompanied by substantial application costs.

As discussed above, the particular rules suggested by Petit appear to embody important specification errors.  They are likely also to lead to substantial application errors because they would require determination of difficult factual issues.  These include, for example, whether the market at issue has tipped, whether the merger is horizontal, and whether the platform’s entry into an untipped market is intended to be permanent.  It thus seems unlikely, at least from this casual review, that adoption of the rules suggested by Petit will reduce error costs.

 Petit’s impressive study might therefore be most valuable, not as a roadmap for action, but as a source of insight and understanding of the facts – what Petit calls a “mental model to help decision makers understand the idiosyncrasies of digital markets.”  If viewed, not as a prescription for action, but as a description of the digital world, the Moligopoly Scenario can help address the urgent matter of reducing the costs of application errors in U.S. antitrust law.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Credit Cards, Error Costs, Facebook, Financial Regulation, Google, Intellectual Property, International, Patent, Platforms, Symposia, Symposium on Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario, Truth on the Market, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , ,
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A Law & Economics Perspective on Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Ben Sperry & Kristian Stout —  23 September 2020

With the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many have already noted her impact on the law as an advocate for gender equality and women’s rights, her importance as a role model for women, and her civility. Indeed, a key piece of her legacy is that she was a jurist in the classic sense of the word: she believed in using coherent legal reasoning to reach a result. And that meant Justice Ginsburg’s decisions sometimes cut against partisan political expectations. 

This is clearly demonstrated in our little corner of the law: RBG frequently voted in the majority on antitrust cases in a manner that—to populist leftwing observers—would be surprising. Moreover, she authored an important case on price discrimination that likewise cuts against the expectation of populist antitrust critics and demonstrates her nuanced jurisprudence.

RBG’s record on the Court shows a respect for the evolving nature of antitrust law

In the absence of written opinions of her own, it is difficult to discern what was actually in Justice Ginsburg’s mind as she encountered antitrust issues. But, her voting record represents at least a willingness to approach antitrust in an apolitical manner. 

Over the last several decades, Justice Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court majority in many cases dealing with a wide variety of antitrust issues, including the duty to deal doctrine, vertical restraints, joint ventures, and mergers. In many of these cases, RBG aligned herself with judgments of the type that the antitrust populists criticize.

The following are major consumer welfare standard cases that helped shape the current state of antitrust law in which she joined the majority or issued a concurrence: 

  • Verizon Commc’ns Inc. v. Law Offices of Curtis Trinko, LLP, 540 U.S. 398 (2004) (unanimous opinion heightening the standard for finding a duty to deal)
  • Pacific Bell Tel. Co v. linkLine Commc’ns, Inc.,  555 U.S. 438 (2009) (Justice Ginsburg joined the concurrence finding there was no “price squeeze” but suggesting the predatory pricing claim should be remanded)
  • Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Ross-Simmons Hardwood Lumber Co., Inc., 549 U.S. 312 (2007) (unanimous opinion finding predatory buying claims are still subject to the dangerous probability of recoupment test from Brooke Group)
  • Apple, Inc. v. Robert Pepper, 139 S.Ct. 1514 (2019) (part of majority written by Justice Kavanaugh finding that iPhone owners were direct purchasers under Illinois Brick that may sue Apple for alleged monopolization)
  • State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997) (unanimous opinion overturning per se treatment of vertical maximum price fixing under Albrecht and applying rule of reason standard)
  • Texaco Inc. v. Dagher, 547 U.S. 1 (2006) (unanimous opinion finding it is not per se illegal under §1 of the Sherman Act for a lawful, economically integrated joint venture to set the prices at which it sells its products)
  • Illinois Tool Works Inc. v. Independent Ink, Inc., 547 U.S. 28 (2006) (unanimous opinion finding a patent does not necessarily confer market power upon the patentee, in all cases involving a tying arrangement, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant has market power in the tying product)
  • U.S. v. Baker Hughes, Inc., 908 F. 2d 981 (D.C. Cir. 1990) (unanimous opinion written by then-Judge Clarence Thomas while both were on the D.C. Circuit of Appeals finding against the government’s argument that the defendant in a Section 7 merger challenge can rebut a prima facie case only by a clear showing that entry into the market by competitors would be quick and effective)

Even where she joined the dissent in antitrust cases, she did so within the ambit of the consumer welfare standard. Thus, while she was part of the dissent in cases like Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877 (2007), Bell Atlantic Corp v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ohio v. American Express Co., 138 S.Ct. 2274 (2018), she still left a legacy of supporting modern antitrust jurisprudence. In those cases, RBG simply  had a different vision for how best to optimize consumer welfare. 

Justice Ginsburg’s Volvo Opinion

The 2006 decision Volvo Trucks North America, Inc. v. Reeder-Simco GMC, Inc. was one of the few antitrust decisions authored by RBG and shows her appreciation for the consumer welfare standard. In particular, Justice Ginsburg affirmed the notion that antitrust law is designed to protect competition not competitors—a lesson that, as of late, needs to be refreshed. 

Volvo, a 7-2 decision, dealt with the Robinson-Patman Act’s prohibition on price discimination. Reeder-Simco, a retail car dealer that sold Volvos, alleged that Volvo Inc. was violating the Robinson-Patman Act by selling cars to them at different prices than to other Volvo dealers.

The Robinson-Patman Act is frequently cited by antitrust populists as a way to return antitrust law to its former glory. A main argument of Lina Khan’s Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox was that the Chicago School had distorted the law on vertical restraints generally, and price discrimination in particular. One source of this distortion in Khan’s opinion has been the Supreme Court’s mishandling of the Robinson-Patman Act.

Yet, in Volvo we see Justice Ginsburg wrestling with the Robinson-Patman Act in a way to give effect to the law as written, which may run counter to some of the contemporary populist impulse to revise the Court’s interpretation of antitrust laws. Justice Ginsburg, citing Brown & Williamson, first noted that: 

Mindful of the purposes of the Act and of the antitrust laws generally, we have explained that Robinson-Patman does not “ban all price differences charged to different purchasers of commodities of like grade and quality.”

Instead, the Robinson-Patman Act was aimed at a particular class of harms that Congress believed existed when large chain-stores were able to exert something like monopsony buying power. Moreover, Justice Ginsburg noted, the Act “proscribes ‘price discrimination only to the extent that it threatens to injure competition’[.]”

Under the Act, plaintiffs needed to demonstrate evidence of Volvo Inc. systematically treating plaintiffs as “disfavored” purchasers as against another set of “favored” purchasers. Instead, all plaintiffs could produce was anecdotal and inconsistent evidence of Volvo Inc. disfavoring them. Thus, the plaintiffs— and theoretically other similarly situated Volvo dealers— were in fact harmed in a sense by Volvo Inc. Yet, Justice Ginsburg was unwilling to rewrite the Act on Congress’s behalf to incorporate new harms later discovered (a fact which would not earn her accolades in populist circles these days). 

Instead, Justice Ginsburg wrote that:

Interbrand competition, our opinions affirm, is the “primary concern of antitrust law.”… The Robinson-Patman Act signals no large departure from that main concern. Even if the Act’s text could be construed in the manner urged by [plaintiffs], we would resist interpretation geared more to the protection of existing competitors than to the stimulation of competition. In the case before us, there is no evidence that any favored purchaser possesses market power, the allegedly favored purchasers are dealers with little resemblance to large independent department stores or chain operations, and the supplier’s selective price discounting fosters competition among suppliers of different brands… By declining to extend Robinson-Patman’s governance to such cases, we continue to construe the Act “consistently with broader policies of the antitrust laws.” Brooke Group, 509 U.S., at 220… (cautioning against Robinson-Patman constructions that “extend beyond the prohibitions of the Act and, in doing so, help give rise to a price uniformity and rigidity in open conflict with the purposes of other antitrust legislation”).

Thus, interested in the soundness of her jurisprudence in the face of a well-developed body of antitrust law, Justice Ginsburg chose to continue to develop that body of law rather than engage in judicial policymaking in favor of a sympathetic plaintiff. 

It must surely be tempting for a justice on the Court to adopt less principled approaches to the law in any given case, and it is equally as impressive that Justice Ginsburg consistently stuck to her principles. We can only hope her successor takes note of Justice Ginsburg’s example.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Constitutional Law, Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Google, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Patent, Platforms, Price Discrimination, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market, Tying, Vertical Restraints , , , , , ,
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The State AGs’ Investigation Against Google Needs to Put Consumers First

William Eric Rinehart —  14 January 2020

In mid-November, the 50 state attorneys general (AGs) investigating Google’s advertising practices expanded their antitrust probe to include the company’s search and Android businesses. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the lead on the case, was supportive of the development, but made clear that other states would manage the investigations of search and Android separately. While attorneys might see the benefit in splitting up search and advertising investigations, platforms like Google need to be understood as a coherent whole. If the state AGs case is truly concerned with the overall impact on the welfare of consumers, it will need to be firmly grounded in the unique economics of this platform.

Back in September, 50 state AGs, including those in Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, announced an investigation into Google. In opening the case, Paxton said that, “There is nothing wrong with a business becoming the biggest game in town if it does so through free market competition, but we have seen evidence that Google’s business practices may have undermined consumer choice, stifled innovation, violated users’ privacy, and put Google in control of the flow and dissemination of online information.” While the original document demands focused on Google’s “overarching control of online advertising markets and search traffic,” reports since then suggest that the primary investigation centers on online advertising.

Defining the market

Since the market definition is the first and arguably the most important step in an antitrust case, Paxton has tipped his hand and shown that the investigation is converging on the online ad market. Yet, he faltered when he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that, “Each year more than 90% of Google’s $117 billion in revenue comes from online advertising. For reference, the entire market for online advertising is around $130 billion annually.” As Patrick Hedger of the Competitive Enterprise Institute was quick to note, Paxton cited global revenue numbers and domestic advertising statistics. In reality, Google’s share of the online advertising market in the United States is 37 percent and is widely expected to fall.

When Google faced scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission in 2013, the leaked staff report explained that “the Commission and the Department of Justice have previously found online ‘search advertising’ to be a distinct product market.” This finding, which dates from 2007, simply wouldn’t stand today. Facebook’s ad platform was launched in 2007 and has grown to become a major competitor to Google. Even more recently, Amazon has jumped into the space and independent platforms like Telaria, Rubicon Project, and The Trade Desk have all made inroads. In contrast to the late 2000s, advertisers now use about four different online ad platforms.

Moreover, the relationship between ad prices and industry concentration is complicated. In traditional economic analysis, fewer suppliers of a product generally translates into higher prices. In the online ad market, however, fewer advertisers means that ad buyers can efficiently target people through keywords. Because advertisers have access to superior information, research finds that more concentration tends to lead to lower search engine revenues. 

The addition of new fronts in the state AGs’ investigation could spell disaster for consumers. While search and advertising are distinct markets, it is the act of tying the two together that makes platforms like Google valuable to users and advertisers alike. Demand is tightly integrated between the two sides of the platform. Changes in user and advertiser preferences have far outsized effects on the overall platform value because each side responds to the other. If users experience an increase in price or a reduction in quality, then they will use the platform less or just log off completely. Advertisers see this change in users and react by reducing their demand for ad placements as well. When advertisers drop out, the total amount of content also recedes and users react once again. Economists call these relationships demand interdependencies. The demand on one side of the market is interdependent with demand on the other. Research on magazines, newspapers, and social media sites all support the existence of demand interdependencies. 

Economists David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, who were cited extensively in the Supreme Court case Ohio v. American Express, explained the importance of their integration into competition analysis, “The key point is that it is wrong as a matter of economics to ignore significant demand interdependencies among the multiple platform sides” when defining markets. If they are ignored, then the typical analytical tools will yield incorrect assessments. Understanding these relationships makes the investigation all that more difficult.

The limits of remedies

Most likely, this current investigation will follow the trajectory of Microsoft in the 1990s when states did the legwork for a larger case brought by the Department of Justice (DoJ). The DoJ already has its own investigation into Google and will probably pull together all of the parties for one large suit. Google is also subject to a probe by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee as well. What is certain is that Google will be saddled with years of regulatory scrutiny, but what remains unclear is what kind of changes the AGs are after.

The investigation might aim to secure behavioral changes, but these often come with a cost in platform industries. The European Commission, for example, got Google to change its practices with its Android operating system for mobile phones. Much like search and advertising, the Android ecosystem is a platform with cross subsidization and demand interdependencies between the various sides of the market. Because the company was ordered to stop tying the Android operating system to apps, manufacturers of phones and tablets now have to pay a licensing fee in Europe if they want Google’s apps and the Play Store. Remedies meant to change one side of the platform resulted in those relationships being unbundled. When regulators force cross subsidization to become explicit prices, consumers are the one who pay.

The absolute worst case scenario would be a break up of Google, which has been a centerpiece of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential platform. As I explained last year, that would be a death warrant for the company:

[T]he value of both Facebook and Google comes in creating the platform, which combines users with advertisers. Before the integration of ad networks, the search engine industry was struggling and it was simply not a major player in the Internet ecosystem. In short, the search engines, while convenient, had no economic value. As Michael Moritz, a major investor of Google, said of those early years, “We really couldn’t figure out the business model. There was a period where things were looking pretty bleak.” But Google didn’t pave the way. Rather, Bill Gross at GoTo.com succeeded in showing everyone how advertising could work to build a business. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin merely adopted the model in 2002 and by the end of the year, the company was profitable for the first time. Marrying the two sides of the platform created value. Tearing them apart will also destroy value.

The state AGs need to resist making this investigation into a political showcase. As Pew noted in documenting the rise of North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein to national prominence, “What used to be a relatively high-profile position within a state’s boundaries has become a springboard for publicity across the country.” While some might cheer the opening of this investigation, consumer welfare needs to be front and center. To properly understand how consumer welfare might be impacted by an investigation, the state AGs need to take seriously the path already laid out by platform economics. For the sake of consumers, let’s hope they are up to the task. 

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Credit Cards, European Union, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Google, International, Justice Department, Market Definition, Platforms, Truth on the Market, Tying , , , , , , ,
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A big year for business and economics in the courts, even if we’re not talking about Janus

Eric Fruits —  27 June 2018

This has been a big year for business in the courts. A U.S. district court approved the AT&T-Time Warner merger, the Supreme Court upheld Amex’s agreements with merchants, and a circuit court pushed back on the Federal Trade Commission’s vague and heavy handed policing of companies’ consumer data safeguards.

These three decisions mark a new era in the intersection of law and economics.

AT&T-Time Warner

AT&T-Time Warner is a vertical merger, a combination of firms with a buyer-seller relationship. Time Warner creates and broadcasts content via outlets such as HBO, CNN, and TNT. AT&T distributes content via services such as DirecTV.

Economists see little risk to competition from vertical mergers, although there are some idiosyncratic circumstances in which competition could be harmed. Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Justice went to court to block the merger.

The last time the goverment sued to block a merger was more than 40 years ago, and the government lost. Since then, the government relied on the threat of litigation to extract settlements from the merging parties. For example, in the 1996 merger between Time Warner and Turner, the FTC required limits on how the new company could bundle HBO with less desirable channels and eliminated agreements that allowed TCI (a cable company that partially owned Turner) to carry Turner channels at preferential rates.

With AT&T-Time Warner, the government took a big risk, and lost. It was a big risk because (1) it’s a vertical merger, and (2) the case against the merger was weak. The government’s expert argued consumers would face an extra 45 cents a month on their cable bills if the merger went through, but under cross-examination, conceded it might be as little as 13 cents a month. That’s a big difference and raised big questions about the reliability of the expert’s model.

Judge Richard J. Leon’s 170+ page ruling agreed that the government’s case was weak and its expert was not credible. While it’s easy to cheer a victory of big business over big government, the real victory was the judge’s heavy reliance on facts, data, and analysis rather than speculation over the potential for consumer harm. That’s a big deal and may make the way for more vertical mergers.

Ohio v. American Express

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Amex may seem obscure. The court backed American Express Co.’s policy of preventing retailers from offering customers incentives to pay with cheaper cards.

Amex charges higher fees to merchants than do other cards, such as Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. Amex cardholders also have higher incomes and tend to spend more at stores than those associated with other networks. And, Amex offers its cardholders better benefits, services, and rewards than the other cards. Merchants don’t like Amex because of the higher fees, customers prefer Amex because of the card’s perks.

Amex, and other card companies, operate in what is known as a two-sided market. Put simply, they have two sets of customers: merchants who pay swipe fees, and consumers who pay fees and interest.

Part of Amex’s agreement with merchants is an “anti-steering” provision that bars merchants from offering discounts for using non-Amex cards. The U.S. Justice Department and a group of states sued the company, alleging the Amex rules limited merchants’ ability to reduce their costs from accepting credit cards, which meant higher retail prices. Amex argued that the higher prices charged to merchants were kicked back to its cardholders in the form of more and better perks.

The Supreme Court found that the Justice Department and states focused exclusively on one side (merchant fees) of the two-sided market. The courts says the government can’t meet its burden by showing some effect on some part of the market. Instead, they must demonstrate, “increased cost of credit card transactions … reduced number of credit card transactions, or otherwise stifled competition.” The government could not prove any of those things.

We live in a world two-sided markets. Amazon may be the biggest two-sided market in the history of the world, linking buyers and sellers. Smartphones such as iPhones and Android devices are two-sided markets, linking consumers with app developers. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Amex sets a standard for how antitrust law should treat the economics of two-sided markets.

LabMD

LabMD is another matter that seems obscure, but could have big impacts on the administrative state.

Since the early 2000s, the FTC has brought charges against more than 150 companies alleging they had bad security or privacy practices. LabMD was one of them, when its computer system was compromised by professional hackers in 2008. The FTC claimed that LabMD’s failure to adequately protect customer data was an “unfair” business practice.

Challenging the FTC can get very expensive and the agency used the threat of litigation to secure settlements from dozens of companies. It then used those settlements to convince everyone else that those settlements constituted binding law and enforceable security standards.

Because no one ever forced the FTC to defend what it was doing in court, the FTC’s assertion of legal authority became a self-fulfilling prophecy. LabMD, however, chose to challege the FTC. The fight drove LabMD out of business, but public interest law firm Cause of Action and lawyers at Ropes & Gray took the case on a pro bono basis.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the FTC’s approach to developing security standards violates basic principles of due process. The court said the FTC’s basic approach—in which the FTC tries to improve general security practices by suing companies that experience security breaches—violates the basic legal principle that the government can’t punish someone for conduct that the government hasn’t previously explained is problematic.

My colleague at ICLE observes the lesson to learn from LabMD isn’t about the illegitimacy of the FTC’s approach to internet privacy and security. Instead, it says legality of the administrative state is premised on courts placing a check on abusive regulators.

The lessons learned from these three recent cases reflect a profound shift in thinkging about the laws governing economic activity:

  • AT&T-Time Warner indicates that facts matter. Mere speculation of potential harms will not satisfy the court.
  • Amex highlights the growing role two-sided markets play in our economy and provides framework for evaluating competition in these markets.
  • LabMD is a small step in reining in the administrative state. Regulations must be scrutinized before they are imposed and enforced.

In some ways none of these decisions are revolutionary. Instead, they reflect an evolution toward greater transparency in how the law is to be applied and greater scrutiny over how the regulations are imposed.

 

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Credit Cards, Data Privacy & Security, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , ,
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Dear Antitrusters: Bias Is Ubiquitous. Stick to the Merits.

Thom Lambert —  26 June 2018

A recent tweet by Lina Khan, discussing yesterday’s American Express decision, exemplifies an unfortunate trend in contemporary antitrust discourse.  Khan wrote:

The economists cited by the Second Circuit (whose opinion SCOTUS affirms) for the analysis of ‘two-sided’ [markets] all had financial links to the credit card sector, as we point out in FN 4 [link to amicus brief].

Her implicit point—made more explicitly in the linked brief, which referred to the economists’ studies as “industry-funded”—was that economic analysis should be discounted if the author has ever received compensation from a firm that might benefit from the proffered analysis.

There are two problems with this reasoning.  First, it’s fallacious.  An ad hominem argument, one addressed “to the person” rather than to the substance of the person’s claims, is a fallacy of irrelevance, sometimes known as a genetic fallacy.  Biased people may make truthful claims, just as unbiased people may get things wrong.  An idea’s “genetics” are irrelevant.  One should assess the substance of the actual idea, not the identity of its proponent.

Second, the reasoning ignores that virtually everyone is biased in some way.  In the antitrust world, those claiming that we should discount the findings and theories of industry-connected experts urging antitrust modesty often stand to gain from having a “bigger” antitrust.

In the common ownership debate about which Mike Sykuta and I have recently been blogging, proponents of common ownership restrictions have routinely written off contrary studies by suggesting bias on the part of the studies’ authors.  All the while, they have ignored their own biases:  If their proposed policies are implemented, their expertise becomes exceedingly valuable to plaintiff lawyers and to industry participants seeking to traverse a new legal minefield.

At the end of our recent paper, The Case for Doing Nothing About Institutional Investors’ Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms, Mike and I wrote, “Such regulatory modesty will prove disappointing to those with a personal interest in having highly complex antitrust doctrines that are aggressively enforced.”  I had initially included a snarky footnote, but Mike, who is far nicer than I, convinced me to remove it.

I’ll reproduce it here in the hopes of reducing the incidence of antitrust ad hominem.

Professor Elhauge has repeatedly discounted criticisms of the common ownership studies by suggesting that critics are biased.  See, e.g., Elhauge, supra note 26, at 1 (observing that “objections to my analysis have been raised in various articles, some funded by institutional investors with large horizontal shareholdings”); id. at 3 (“My analysis of executive compensation has been critiqued in a paper by economic consultants O’Brien and Waehrer that was funded by the Investment Company Institute, which represents institutional investors and was headed for the last three years by the CEO of Vanguard.”); Elhauge, supra note 124, at 3 (observing that airline and banking studies “have been critiqued in other articles, some funded by the sort of institutional investors that have large horizontal shareholdings”); id. at 17 (“The Investment Company Institute, an association of institutional investors that for the preceding three years was headed by the CEO of Vanguard, has funded a couple of papers to critique the empirical study showing an adverse link between horizontal shareholding and airline prices.”); id. (observing that co-authors of critique “both have significant experience in the airline industry because they consulted either for the airlines or the DOJ on airline mergers that were approved notwithstanding high levels of horizontal shareholding”); id. at 19 (“The Investment Company Institute has responded by funding a second critique of the airline study.”); id. at 23-24 (“Even to the extent that such studies are not directly funded by industry, when an industry has been viewed as benign for a long time, confirmation bias is a powerful force that will incline many to interpret any data to find no adverse effects.”).  He fails, however, to acknowledge his own bias.  As a professor of antitrust law at one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools, he has an interest in having antitrust be as big and complicated as possible: The more complex the doctrine, and the broader its reach, the more valuable a preeminent antitrust professor’s expertise becomes.  This is not to suggest that one should discount the assertions of Professor Elhauge or other proponents of restrictions on common ownership.  It is simply to observe that bias is unavoidable and that the best approach is therefore to evaluate claims according to their substance, not according to who is asserting them.

In Antitrust & Competition, Banking, Corporate & Securities Law, Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Justice Department, Platforms, Supreme Court, Twitter , , ,
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The First Priority of Antitrust Analysis is Getting It Right, Not Making it Easier

Gus Hurwitz & Kristian Stout —  5 March 2018

Excess is unflattering, no less when claiming that every evolution in legal doctrine is a slippery slope leading to damnation. In Friday’s New York Times, Lina Khan trots down this alarmist path while considering the implications for the pending Supreme Court case of Ohio v. American Express. One of the core issues in the case is the proper mode of antitrust analysis for credit card networks as two-sided markets. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with arguments, such as those that we have made, that it is important to consider the costs and benefits to both sides of a two-sided market when conducting an antitrust analysis. The Second Circuit’s opinion is under review in the American Express case.

Khan regards the Second Circuit approach of conducting a complete analysis of these markets as a mistake.

On her reading, the idea that an antitrust analysis of credit card networks should reflect their two-sided-ness would create “de facto antitrust immunity” for all platforms:

If affirmed, the Second Circuit decision would create de facto antitrust immunity for the most powerful companies in the economy. Since internet technologies have enabled the growth of platform companies that serve multiple groups of users, firms like Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Uber are set to be prime beneficiaries of the Second Circuit’s warped analysis. Amazon, for example, could claim status as a two-sided platform because it connects buyers and sellers of goods; Google because it facilitates a market between advertisers and search users… Indeed, the reason that the tech giants are lining up behind the Second Circuit’s approach is that — if ratified — it would make it vastly more difficult to use antitrust laws against them.

This paragraph is breathtaking. First, its basic premise is wrong. Requiring a complete analysis of the complicated economic effects of conduct undertaken in two sided markets before imposing antitrust liability would not create “de facto antitrust immunity.” It would require that litigants present, and courts evaluate, credible evidence sufficient to establish a claim upon which an enforcement action can be taken — just like in any other judicial proceeding in any area of law. Novel market structures may require novel analytical models and novel evidence, but that is no different with two-sided markets than with any other complicated issue before a court.

Second, the paragraph’s prescribed response would be, in fact, de facto antitrust liability for any firm competing in a two-sided market — that is, as Kahn notes, almost every major tech firm.

A two-sided platform competes with other platforms by facilitating interactions between the two sides of the market. This often requires a careful balancing of the market: in most of these markets too many or too few participants on one side of the market reduces participation on the other side. So these markets play the role of matchmaker, charging one side of the market a premium in order to cross-subsidize a desirable level of participation on the other. This will be discussed more below, but the takeaway for now is that most of these platforms operate by charging one side of the market (or some participants on one side of the market) an above-cost price in order to charge the other side of the market a below-cost price. A platform’s strategy on either side of the market makes no sense without the other, and it does not adopt practices on one side without carefully calibrating them with the other. If one does not consider both sides of these markets, therefore, the simplistic approach that Kahn demands will systematically fail to capture both the intent and the effect of business practices in these markets. More importantly, such an approach could be used to find antitrust violations throughout these industries — no matter the state of competition, market share, or actual consumer effects.

What are two-sided markets?

Khan notes that there is some element of two-sidedness in many (if not most) markets:

Indeed, almost all markets can be understood as having two sides. Firms ranging from airlines to meatpackers could reasonably argue that they meet the definition of “two-sided,” thereby securing less stringent review.

This is true, as far as it goes, as any sale of goods likely involves the selling party acting as some form of intermediary between chains of production and consumption. But such a definition is unworkably broad from the point of view of economic or antitrust analysis. If two-sided markets exist as distinct from traditional markets there must be salient features that define those specialized markets.

Economists have been intensively studying two-sided markets (see, e.g., here, here, and here) for the past two decades (and had recognized many of their basic characteristics even before then). As Khan notes, multi-sided platforms have indeed existed for a long time in the economy. Newspapers, for example, provide a targeted outlet for advertisers and incentives for subscribers to view advertisements; shopping malls aggregate retailers in one physical location to lower search costs for customers, while also increasing the retailers’ sales volume. Relevant here, credit card networks are two-sided platforms, facilitating credit-based transactions between merchants and consumers.

One critical feature of multi-sided platforms is the interdependent demand of platform participants. Thus, these markets require a simultaneous critical mass of users on each side in order to ensure the viability of the platform. For instance, a credit card is unlikely to be attractive to consumers if few merchants accept it; and few merchants will accept a credit card that isn’t used by a sufficiently large group of consumers. To achieve critical mass, a multi-sided platform uses both pricing and design choices, and, without critical mass on all sides, the positive feedback effects that enable the platform’s unique matching abilities might not be achieved.

This highlights the key distinction between traditional markets and multi-sided markets. Most markets have two sides (e.g., buyers and sellers), but that alone doesn’t make them meaningfully multi-sided. In a multi-sided market a key function of the platform is to facilitate the relationship between the sides of the market in order to create and maintain an efficient relationship between them. The platform isn’t merely a reseller of a manufacturer’s goods, for instance, but is actively encouraging or discouraging participation by users on both sides of the platform in order to maximize the value of the platform itself — not the underlying transaction — for those users. Consumers, for instance, don’t really care how many pairs of jeans a clothier stocks; but a merchant does care how many cardholders an issuer has on its network. This is most often accomplished by using prices charged to each side (in the case of credit cards, so-called interchange fees) to keep each side an appropriate size.

Moreover, the pricing that occurs on a two-sided platform is secondary, to a varying extent, to the pricing of the subject of the transaction. In a two-sided market, the prices charged to either side of the market are an expression of the platform’s ability to control the terms on which the different sides meet to transact and is relatively indifferent to the thing about which the parties are transacting.

The nature of two-sided markets highlights the role of these markets as more like facilitators of transactions and less like traditional retailers of goods (though this distinction is a matter of degree, and different two-sided markets can be more-or-less two-sided). Because the platform uses prices charged to each side of the market in order to optimize overall use of the platform (that is, output or volume of transactions), pricing in these markets operates differently than pricing in traditional markets. In short, the pricing on one side of the platform is often used to subsidize participation on the other side of the market, because the overall value to both sides is increased as a result. Or, conversely, pricing to one side of the market may appear to be higher than the equilibrium level when viewed for that side alone, because this funds a subsidy to increase participation on another side of the market that, in turn, creates valuable network effects for the side of the market facing the higher fees.

The result of this dynamic is that it is more difficult to assess the price and output effects in multi-sided markets than in traditional markets. One cannot look at just one side of the platform — at the level of output and price charged to consumers of the underlying product, say — but must look at the combined pricing and output of both the underlying transaction as well as the platform’s service itself, across all sides of the platform.

Thus, as David Evans and Richard Schmalensee have observed, traditional antitrust reasoning is made more complicated in the presence of a multi-sided market:

[I]t is not possible to know whether standard economic models, often relied on for antitrust analysis, apply to multi-sided platforms without explicitly considering the existence of multiple customer groups with interdependent demand…. [A] number of results for single-sided firms, which are the focus of much of the applied antitrust economics literature, do not apply directly to multi-sided platforms.

The good news is that antitrust economists have been focusing significant attention on two- and multi-sided markets for a long while. Their work has included attention to modelling the dynamics and effects of competition in these markets, including how to think about traditional antitrust concepts such as market definition, market power and welfare analysis. What has been lacking, however, has been substantial incorporation of this analysis into judicial decisions. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that the Second Circuit’s opinion in this case was, and why the Supreme Court’s opinion will be, so important: this work has reached the point that courts are recognizing that these markets can and should be analyzed differently than traditional markets.

Getting the two-sided analysis wrong in American Express would harm consumers

Khan describes credit card networks as a “classic case of oligopoly,” and opines that American Express’s contractual anti-steering provision is, “[a]s one might expect, the credit card companies us[ing] their power to block competition.” The initial, inherent tension in this statement should be obvious: the assertion is simultaneously that this a non-competitive, oligopolistic market and that American Express is using the anti-steering provision to harm its competitors. Indeed, rather than demonstrating a classic case of oligopoly, this demonstrates the competitive purpose that the anti-steering provision serves: facilitating competition between American Express and other card issuers.

The reality of American Express’s anti-steering provision, which prohibits merchants who choose to accept AmEx cards from “steering” their customers to pay for purchases with other cards, is that it is necessary in order for American Express to compete with other card issuers. Just like analysis of multi-sided markets needs to consider all sides of the market, platforms competing in these markets need to compete on all sides of the market.

But the use of complex pricing schemes to determine prices on each side of the market to maintain an appropriate volume of transactions in the overall market creates a unique opportunity for competitors to behave opportunistically. For instance, if one platform charges a high fee to one side of the market in order to subsidize another side of the market (say, by offering generous rewards), this creates an opportunity for a savvy competitor to undermine that balancing by charging the first side of the market a lower fee, thus attracting consumers from its competitor and, perhaps, making its pricing strategy unprofitable. This may appear to be mere price competition. But the effects of price competition on one side of a multi-sided market are more complicated to evaluate than those of traditional price competition.

Generally, price competition has the effect of lowering prices for goods, increasing output, decreasing deadweight losses, and benefiting consumers. But in a multi-sided market, the high prices charged to one side of the market can be used to benefit consumers on the other side of the market; and that consumer benefit can increase output on that side of the market in ways that create benefits for the first side of the market. When a competitor poaches a platform’s business on a single side of a multi-sided market, the effects can be negative for users on every side of that platform’s market.

This is most often seen in cases, like with credit cards, where platforms offer differentiated products. American Express credit cards are qualitatively different than Visa and Mastercard credit cards; they charge more (to both sides of the market) but offer consumers a more expansive rewards program (funded by the higher transaction fees charged to merchants) and offer merchants access to what are often higher-value customers (ensured by the higher fees charged to card holders).

If American Express did not require merchants to abide by its anti-steering rule, it wouldn’t be able to offer this form of differentiated product; it would instead be required to compete solely on price. Cardholders exist who prefer higher-status cards with a higher-tier of benefits, and there are merchants that prefer to attract a higher-value pool of customers.

But without the anti-steering provisions, the only competition available is on the price to merchants. The anti-steering rule is needed in order to prevent merchants from free-riding on American Express’s investment in attracting a unique group of card holders to its platform. American Express maintains that differentiation from other cards by providing its card holders with unique and valuable benefits — benefits that are subsidized in part by the fees charged to merchants. But merchants that attract customers by advertising that they accept American Express cards but who then steer those customers to other cards erode the basis of American Express’s product differentiation. Because of the interdependence of both sides of the platform, this ends up undermining the value that consumers receive from the platform as American Express ultimately withdraws consumer-side benefits. In the end, the merchants who valued American Express in the first place are made worse off by virtue of being permitted to selectively free-ride on American Express’s network investment.

At this point it is important to note that many merchants continue to accept American Express cards in light of both the cards’ higher merchant fees and these anti-steering provisions. Meanwhile, Visa and Mastercard have much larger market shares, and many merchants do not accept Amex. The fact that merchants who may be irritated by the anti-steering provision continue to accept Amex despite it being more costly, and the fact that they could readily drop Amex and rely on other, larger, and cheaper networks, suggests that American Express creates real value for these merchants. In other words, American Express, in fact, must offer merchants access to a group of consumers who are qualitatively different from those who use Visa or Mastercard cards — and access to this group of consumers must be valuable to those merchants.

An important irony in this case is that those who criticize American Express’s practices, who are arguing these practices limit price competition and that merchants should be able to steer customers to lower-fee cards, generally also argue that modern antitrust law focuses too myopically on prices and fails to account for competition over product quality. But that is precisely what American Express is trying to do: in exchange for a higher price it offers a higher quality card for consumers, and access to a different quality of consumers for merchants.

Anticompetitive conduct here, there, everywhere! Or nowhere.

The good news is that many on the court — and, for that matter, even Ohio’s own attorney — recognize that the effects of the anti-steering rule on the cardholder side of the market need to be considered alongside their effects on merchants:

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Does output include premiums or rewards to customers?
MR. MURPHY: Yeah. Output would include quality considerations as well.

The bad news is that several justices don’t seem to get it. Justice Kagan, for instance, suggested that “the effect of these anti-steering provisions means a market where we will only have high-cost/high-service products.” Justice Kagan’s assertion reveals the hubris of the would-be regulator, bringing to her evaluation of the market a preconception of what that market is supposed to look like. To wit: following her logic, one can say just as much that without the anti-steering provisions we would have a market with only low-cost/low-service products. Without an evaluation of the relative effects — which is more complicated than simple intuition suggests, especially since one can always pay cash — there is no reason to say that either of these would be a better outcome.

The reality, however, is that it is possible for the market to support both high- and low-cost, and high- and low-service products. In fact, this is the market in which we live today. As Justice Gorsuch said, “American Express’s agreements don’t affect MasterCard or Visa’s opportunity to cut their fees … or to advertise that American Express’s are higher. There is room for all kinds of competition here.” Indeed, one doesn’t need to be particularly creative to come up with competitive strategies that other card issuers could adopt, from those that Justice Gorsuch suggests, to strategies where card issuers are, in fact, “forced” to accept higher fees, which they in turn use to attract more card holders to their networks, such as through sign-up bonuses or awards for American Express customers who use non-American Express cards at merchants who accept them.

A standard response to such proposals is “if that idea is so good, why isn’t the market already doing it?” An important part of the answer in this case is that MasterCard and Visa know that American Express relies on the anti-steering provision in order to maintain its product differentiation.

Visa and Mastercard were initially defendants in this case, as well, as they used similar rules to differentiate some of their products. It’s telling that these larger market participants settled because, to some extent, harming American Express is worth more to them than their own product differentiation. After all, consumers steered away from American Express will generally use Visa or Mastercard (and their own high-priced cards may be cannibalizing from their own low-priced cards anyway, so reducing their value may not hurt so much). It is therefore a better strategy for them to try to use the courts to undermine that provision so that they don’t actually need to compete with American Express.

Without the anti-steering provision, American Express loses its competitive advantage compared to MasterCard and Visa and would be forced to compete against those much larger platforms on their preferred terms. What’s more, this would give those platforms access to American Express’s vaunted high-value card holders without the need to invest resources in competing for them. In other words, outlawing anti-steering provisions could in fact have both anti-competitive intent and effect.

Of course, card networks aren’t necessarily innocent of anticompetitive conduct, one way or the other. Showing that they are on either side of the anti-steering rule requires a sufficiently comprehensive analysis of the industry and its participants’ behavior. But liability cannot be simply determined based on behavior on one side of a two-sided market. These companies can certainly commit anticompetitive mischief, and they need to be held accountable when that happens. But this case is not about letting American Express or tech companies off the hook for committing anticompetitive conduct. This case is about how we evaluate such allegations, weigh them against possible beneficial effects, and put in place the proper thorough analysis for this particular form of business.

Over the last two decades, scholars have studied the nature of multi-sided platforms, and have made a good deal of progress. We should rely on this learning, and make sure that antitrust analysis is sound, not expedient.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Credit Cards, Facebook, Financial Regulation, Google, Market Definition, Platforms, Supreme Court, Truth on the Market , , , , ,
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The Supreme Court upholds freedom of contract in American Express v Italian Colors Restaurant

Thomas McCarthy —  25 June 2013

[The following is a guest post by Thomas McCarthy on the Supreme Court’s recent Amex v. Italian Colors Restaurant decision. Tom is a partner at Wiley Rein, LLP and a George Mason Law grad. He is/was also counsel for, among others,

So he’s had a busy week….]

The Supreme Court’s recent opinion in American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant (June 20, 2013) (“Amex”) is a resounding victory for freedom-of-contract principles.  As it has done repeatedly in recent terms (see AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion (2011); Marmet Health Care Center, Inc. v. Brown (2012)), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) makes arbitration “a matter of contract,” requiring courts to “rigorously enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms.”  Amex at 3.  In so doing, it rejected the theory that class procedures must remain available to claimants in order to ensure that they have sufficient financial incentive to prosecute federal statutory claims of relatively low value.  Consistent with the freedom-of-contract principles enshrined in the FAA, an arbitration agreement must be enforced—even if the manner in which the parties agreed to arbitrate leaves would-be claimants with low-value claims that are not worth pursuing.

In Amex, merchants who accept American Express cards filed a class action against Amex, asserting that Amex violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by “us[ing] its monopoly power in the market for charge cards to force merchants to accept credit cards at rates approximately 30% higher than the fees for competing credit cards.”  Amex at 1-2.  And, of course, the merchants sought treble damages for the class under Section 4 of the Clayton Act.  Under the terms of their agreement with American Express, the merchants had agreed to resolve all disputes via individual arbitration, that is, without the availability of class procedures.  Consistent with that agreement, American Express moved to compel individual arbitration, but the merchants countered that the costs of expert analysis necessary to prove their antitrust claims would greatly exceed the maximum recovery for any individual plaintiff, thereby precluding them from effectively vindicating their federal statutory rights under the Sherman Act.  The Second Circuit sided with the merchants, holding that the prohibitive costs the merchants would face if they had to arbitrate on an individual basis rendered the class-action waiver in the arbitration agreement unenforceable.

In a 5-3 majority (per Justice Scalia), the Supreme Court reversed.  The Court began by highlighting the Federal Arbitration Act’s freedom-of-contract mandate—that “courts must rigorously enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms, including terms that specify with whom [the parties] choose to arbitrate their disputes, and the rules under which that arbitration will be conducted.”  Amex at 2-3 (internal quotations and citations omitted).  It emphasized that this mandate applies even to federal statutory claims, “unless the FAA’s mandate has been overridden by a contrary congressional command.”  Amex at 3 (internal quotations and citations omitted).  The Court then briefly explained that no contrary congressional command exists in either the federal antitrust laws or Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which allows for class actions in certain circumstances).

Next, the Court turned to the merchants’ principal argument—that the arbitration agreement should not be enforced because enforcing it (including its class waiver provision) would preclude plaintiffs from effectively vindicating their federal statutory rights.  The Court noted that this “effective vindication” exception “originated as dictum” in prior cases and that the Court has only “asserted [its] existence” without ever having applied it in any particular case.  Amex at 6.  The Court added that this exception grew out of a desire to prevent a “prospec­tive waiver of a party’s right to pursue statutory reme­dies,” explaining that it “would certainly cover a provision in an arbitration agreement forbidding the assertion of certain statutory rights.”  The Court added that this exception might “perhaps cover filing and administrative fees attached to arbitration that are so high as to make access to the forum impracticable,” Amex at 6, but emphasized that, whatever the scope of this exception, the fact that the manner of arbitration the parties contracted for might make it “not worth the expense” to pursue a statutory remedy “does not constitute the elimination of the right to pursue that remedy.”  Amex at 7.

The Court closed by noting that its previous decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion “all but resolves this case.”  Amex at 8.  In Concepcion, the Court had invalidated a state law “conditioning enforcement of arbitration on the availability of class procedures because that law ‘interfere[d] with fundamental attributes of arbitration.’”   As the Court explained, Concepcion specifically rejected the argument “that class arbitration was necessary to prosecute claims ‘that might otherwise slip through the legal system’” thus establishing “that the FAA’s command to enforce arbitration agreements trumps any interest in ensuring the prosecution of low value claims.”  Amex at 9 (quoting Concepcion).  The Court made clear that, under the FAA, courts are to hold parties to the deal they struck—arbitration pursuant to the terms of their arbitration agreements, even if that means that certain claims may go unprosecuted.  Responding to a dissent penned by Justice Kagan, who complained that the Court’s decision would lead to “[l]ess arbitration,” contrary to the pro-arbitration policies of the FAA, Amex dissent at 5, the Court doubled down on this point, emphasizing that the FAA “favor[s] the absence of litigation when that is the consequence of a class-action waiver, since its ‘principal purpose’ is the enforcement of arbitration agreements according to their terms.”  Amex at 9 n.5 (emphasis added).

By holding parties to the deal they struck regarding the resolution of their disputes, the Court properly vindicates the FAA’s freedom-of-contract mandates.  And even assuming the dissenters are correct that there will be less arbitration in individual instances, the opposite is true on a macro level.  For where there is certainty in contract enforcement, parties will enter into contracts.  Amex thus should promote arbitration by eliminating uncertainty in contracting and thereby removing a barrier to swift and efficient resolution of disputes.

In Antitrust & Competition, Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Regulation, Supreme Court, Telecommunications, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Some Links

Josh Wright —  16 June 2010
  • TOTM guest blogger Steve Salop makes the case for Vertical Merger Guidelines
  • National Supermarkets Association files class action interchange-based antitrust suit against American Express (apparently alleging the relevant market is “American Express payment card services”!)
  • Dell puts aside $100 million reserve fund in case it has to settle the SEC allegations we blogged about here involving disclosure of rebates
  • The latest on the FTC’s Apple investigation here, here and here
  • Epstein on tort liability  for BP (WSJ)
In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Merger Guidelines, Platforms, Telecommunications, Wireless
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Gretchen Morgenson Calls for Greater Protection (?) of High-Risk Consumers of Credit

Thom Lambert —  18 January 2010

Gretchen Morgenson doesn’t want poor people to have access to consumer credit. At least, that’s what I think she’s saying in her rambling NYT column this week.

Congress and federal regulators have recently taken a number of actions that will make it tougher for riskier customers to access consumer credit. First there was the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which precludes issuers from charging fees for services like telephone payments, requires a number of disclosures and advanced warnings, and makes it harder for issuers to raise interest rates and charge over-limit fees. Then there are the new Fed regulations set to go into effect next month. Those rules, which implement the Credit Card Act, preclude credit card issuers from raising interest rates for the ensuing twelve months after an account is opened, and then only on new charges, not on existing balances. By limiting an issuer’s ability to reprice credit based on changes in a customer’s risk profile, the Credit Card Act and Fed rules will make it harder for risky consumers to access consumer credit.

But all these things aren’t enough for Ms. Morgenson. She’s upset that issuers catering to higher-risk consumers are finding other sources of revenue:

An example is Alliance Data Systems, a big issuer of private-label credit cards like those that specialty stores offer. It has decided to levy a $1 monthly surcharge to customers who choose to receive account statements by mail. Proof, yet again, that if you close the door, they will come in through the window. And if you close the window, they blow through the door.

Ms. Morgenson sees Alliance’s $1 charge for assembling, printing, and mailing a paper bill (as opposed to posting the bill on the Internet) as inconsistent with the thrust of the new Fed regulations and the Credit Card Act, and she calls on regulators to “pursue companies flouting the spirit or the letter of the new rules.” Never mind that the small and seemingly justified charge is consistent with the actual terms (as opposed to the amorphous “spirit”) of the new regulations. Never mind also that those new rules have effectively forced Alliance to impose this slight charge if it wants to continue servicing high-risk consumers without raising interest rates. Indeed, Ms. Morgenson recognizes that Alliance caters to riskier customers and is generally compensated via penalty fees rather than higher interest rates:

William Ryan, an analyst at Portales Partners in New York, said the $1 statement fee wasn’t a surprise, given Alliance’s business model. “A disproportionate part of Alliance Data Systems’ yield comes from penalty fees,” he said, “so by default they would be more proportionately impacted by the Credit Card Act than an American Express that caters to higher-end customers.”

Ms. Morgenson thus seems to acknowledge that if the law is enforced as she’d prefer an issuer like Alliance must either charge higher interest rates or up-front service fees, cater exclusively to higher-end customers (a la American Express), or shut down. (She might say that Alliance could also just reduce its revenues, but doing so would probably drive its capital elsewhere.) All these options would make it harder for poorer and riskier consumers to access consumer credit.

But that doesn’t bother Ms. Morgenson. She admits that she prefers a paternalistic “nanny state” to “the pirate state that brought this economy to its knees.” I wonder if the high-risk consumers she’s trying to protect share her views?

In Credit Cards, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Regulation, Google, Platforms, Regulation , ,
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Merchant Collusion as an Antitrust Remedy

Josh Wright —  9 December 2009

In my first post I discussed the potential for interchange legislation from a consumer protection perspective, that is, would the combination of disclosure requirements coupled with a reduction of interchange fees be likely to improve consumer welfare.   I concluded that from the consumer protection perspective, the case for interchange legislation was weak.  I noted that a highly likely consequence of a direct or indirect reduction in interchange would result in an increase in the cost of credit to consumers (higher finance charges, other fees, annual fees) or a reduction of consumer benefits (loyalty and rewards programs).  The significant risk of a reduction of consumer access to credit, especially given the tenuous state of the economic recovery and the critical role of consumer spending in generating economic expansion and jobs, imposes a significant risk of consumer and social losses without strong evidence of offsetting consumer protection value.  However, consumer protection is not the only possible defense of such legislation.  This post will focus on defense of interchange legislation from a competition policy perspective.

As the commentators in this symposium suggest, as does the long and storied antitrust history of Visa and MasterCard, the more conventional story is that interchange fees are the product of a market power and the lack of competition between payment card systems.   Much of the discussion here has followed that general framework and focuses on the “cross-subsidy” question and the role of interchange legislation in increasing efficiency by reducing “usage” externalities.   The essence of this argument is that interchange fees should be regulated or eliminated in order to avoid cross-subsidization of payment card users by those using cash or checks (but see Ron Mann’s post here, focusing on the subsidy running from high interchange credit products to low interchange debit transactions).  So far, the symposium contributors have been largely skeptical of this defense.  For example, my colleague Todd Zywicki notes;

So it may be theoretically possible to imagine that credit cards are overused as a transaction medium.  On the other hand, it may also be possible that consumers underuse electronic payments because they don’t consider the social benefits of electronic payments, such as increasing efficiency, tax compliance, reduced risk of theft (and the police force and judicial system that accompany that)—in which case, it is possible that credit cards should be subsidized, not taxed.  Finally, it seems at least as plausible (probably more so) that consumers overuse cash and checks because those payment systems are subsidized by the government or that some of their costs are externalized, thus consumers don’t pay their full price.

Tom Brown and Tim Muris argue that the objection to cross-subsidies is overdone, emphasizing the ubiquity of such cross-subsidies and noting that the shift toward electronic payments render this objection largely moot:

At the outset, we note that discount fees, unlike interchange, are a feature of virtually all private payment instruments.  Thus, if there is something to the notion that discount fees tax other forms of payment, then the criticism applies as much to American Express and Discover as it does to MasterCard and Visa.  In our view, however, although this criticism is oft repeated, repetition obscures a number of problems.

First, cross-subsidies are ubiquitous in any complex economy.  Consumers receive free refills on drinks in restaurants, free parking at shopping malls, goods below cost in supermarkets (via loss leaders), relatively inexpensive newspapers because advertisers pay most of the costs, and many similar benefits.  To bring buyers and sellers together through such intermediaries as newspapers, supermarkets, and credit cards, one side frequently receives inducements to participate.  These inducements help maximize the joint value of the ultimate transaction for the parties.  Rather than an inefficient “subsidy,” these inducements are the lubricant necessary to make the economic machine work at its best.

I agree with these commentators that the cross-subsidy “problem” does not warrant a regulatory fix.  But I have a slightly different, and more antitrust-centric perspective.  Brown and Muris note the ubiquity of cross-subsidies in restaurants, supermarkets, and shopping malls.  These are just examples.  Cross-subsidization would occur not only in these settings, and in settings where firms do not plausibly have market power, but would also occur in closed-loop systems that do not use interchange fees, suggesting that this criticism has more to do with the necessity of balancing in two-sided markets rather than interchange per se.  But the important point from an antitrust perspective is that cross-subsidization is a normal and healthy part of the competitive process that generates substantial benefits for consumers.  The normal competitive process frequently does not result in customers being charged for all of the costs associated with their purchases.  Consumers face such cross-subsidies every time they go to Starbucks for their caffeine fix or an all you can eat buffet.  Some consumers are very sensitive to which products are allocated to the eye level shelf space in the grocery store, while others will purchase their favorite product regardless of where it is put on the shelf.   The very idea of promotion is to target what amount to effective discounts at marginal consumers rather than the infra-marginal ones.  See generally, Benjamin Klein, Kevin Murphy, Andres Lerner and Lacey Plache, Competition in Two Sided Markets: The Antitrust Economics of Payment Card Interchange Fees, 73 Antitrust L.J. 571 (2005).

Understanding the nature of promotion, and therefore cross-subsidization, as a part of the normal competitive process offers a new perspective on the potential for interchange legislation as an antitrust remedy.  Competition in highly competitive markets, such as grocery retail, results in supermarkets competing by offering various promotional services to marginal consumers.  Sometimes this competition results in free parking that some consumers use but others pay for, sometimes it results in dimensions of non-price competition (like offering a deli or keeping the store clean) that some consumers value more than others.  Competition between supermarkets to shift sales from these marginal consumers generate largely inter-retailer effects, but that cannot be said to be “inefficient” in any meaningful way.  This form of competition is essential to the competitive process.  Consider the interchange legislation in this light.  Do we, in response to supermarket competition resulting in “usage externalities” call for legislation that would allow the supermarkets to collude?  Of course not.  From a competition perspective, the very idea of replicating the collusive outcome for merchants and allowing a coordinated reduction in competition on the grounds that it would reduce cross-subsidies or costs wouldn’t make economic sense.  But notice that collusion between supermarkets to refuse to offer free parking, clean stores, or other promotional services would surely reduce the costs to the retailers in the same way that interchange would result in a reduction of costs to the merchants.

One possible explanation of our tolerance of these arguments is a failure to understand that, like in the case of supermarkets, competition between merchants on the acceptance of payment cards is a normal part of the competitive process.  But there is another possible and more plausible argument: countervailing power.  In other words, one could argue that legislation to allow collective monopsony conduct is appropriate to offset monopoly power (see, e.g., Steve Salop’s recent guest post here at TOTM on this issue in a different context).  Whether or not this justification is persuasive depends on the degree to which payment system market power explains interchange fees.  As it turns out, there is not compelling evidence that this is the case.  For example, consider that regulation reducing the interchange fees for open loop systems (and reducing their ability to balance both sides of the market) results in a shift of total credit purchase volume toward closed loop systems.  The loss in share that MC and Visa experienced in reaction to the Australian regulation suggests that interchange levels were not supra-competitive before the regulation.  Further, as Klein et al (2005) suggest, the time series evidence also casts doubt over the claim that market power explains interchange fee levels since fees were falling from 1977 to 91 while the importance of the payment systems was growing, and that fees remained lower in 2005 than they were in 1971.  In short, interchange fee levels appear to be a poor proxy for market power, and there does not appear to be convincing empirical evidence that market power explains changes in interchange fees.

In the absence of such evidence of a compelling problem, the regulatory “fix” of replicating the collusive outcome for merchants and interfere with the normal competitive process appears to be sure to shift rents between sides of the market, but more importantly, to impose a significant risk of doing more harm than good for the consumers it is purportedly designed to protect.

In Antitrust & Competition, Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, The Law & Economics of Interchange Fees Symposium
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Competitive Payments

Ronald Mann —  9 December 2009

Most of the discussion related to pricing at the point of sale has emphasized the “cross-subsidy” between those that pay with cash and checks and those that pay with credit cards.  This discussion misses the core of the problem in a market where the use of cash and checks is rapidly declining; the central problem is the differential pricing of different card products.  The reaction of the card networks to their “loss” in the debit-card and American Express litigation was to create two new product lines (Visa Signature and World MasterCard) that have unusually high interchange fees, 1-2% higher than typical Visa and MasterCard products.  The rationale for these products from the network’s perspective is two-fold.  First, the increased interchange revenues compensate for lowered interchange revenues on debit-card transactions.  Second, issuers collect higher interchange revenues and thus would not shift their business out of Visa and MasterCard and toward American Express.

The problem from the merchant’s perspective is that these cards differ in no substantial way from the conventional credit products, except that they cost more.  The same customers that formerly used a typical Visa or MasterCard product now use a high-interchange product.  Although those customers often have multiple cards in their wallet from which to choose, they are likely to choose the high-interchange product because it brings them more rewards.  Merchants that do not believe the products motivate increased spending in their stores have no practical response except to refuse all Visa, or all MasterCard products.  Thus, the networks face no price pressure, because the only competitive pressure they face is to keep issuers from moving to other networks.

If the best way to identify prices is to let the market set them, perhaps the best reform is the simplest: allow merchants to discriminate among the products of the various networks, to surcharge or decline products priced at a level that is unattractive to the individual merchant.  Wal-Mart and Walgreen’s might immediately decline to accept Visa Signature and World MasterCard at their current price.  Their customers, predictably, would make identical purchases but simply pull a different card from their wallet.  Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s probably would continue to accept the high-cost products, worried that customers might spend less or go elsewhere if they can’t use their high-rewards cards.  Visa and MasterCard could judge for themselves whether it would be appropriate to decrease, or increase, the interchange fees for those cards.  The outcome, though, would be price levels determined by the attractiveness of the particular products to particular merchants.

In Credit Cards, Financial Regulation, Law & Economics, The Law & Economics of Interchange Fees Symposium
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