Archives For international antitrust

The Virulence of Free Trade

Ramsi Woodcock —  31 March 2020

[TOTM: The following is part of a blog series by TOTM guests and authors on the law, economics, and policy of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The entire series of posts is available here.

This post is authored by Ramsi Woodcock, (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Kentucky; Assistant Professor of Management, Gatton College of Business and Economics).]

Specialists know that the antitrust courses taught in law schools and economics departments have an alter ego in business curricula: the course on business strategy. The two courses cover the same material, but from opposite perspectives. Antitrust courses teach how to end monopolies; strategy courses teach how to construct and maintain them.

Strategy students go off and run businesses, and antitrust students go off and make government policy. That is probably the proper arrangement if the policy the antimonopolists make is domestic. We want the domestic economy to run efficiently, and so we want domestic policymakers to think about monopoly—and its allocative inefficiencies—as something to be discouraged.

The coronavirus, and the shortages it has caused, have shown us that putting the antimonopolists in charge of international policy is, by contrast, a very big mistake.

Because we do not yet have a world government. America’s position, in relation to the rest of the world, is therefore more akin to that of a business navigating a free market than it is to a government seeking to promote efficient interactions among the firms that it governs. To flourish, America must engage in international trade with a view to creating and maintaining monopoly positions for itself, rather than eschewing them in the interest of realizing efficiencies in the global economy. Which is to say: we need strategists, not antimonopolists.

For the global economy is not America, and there is no guarantee that competitive efficiencies will redound to America’s benefit, rather than to those of her competitors. Absent a world government, other countries will pursue monopoly regardless what America does, and unless America acts strategically to build and maintain economic power, America will eventually occupy a position of commercial weakness, with all of the consequences for national security that implies.

When Antimonopolists Make Trade Policy

The free traders who have run American economic policy for more than a generation are antimonopolists playing on a bigger stage. Like their counterparts in domestic policy, they are loyal in the first instance only to the efficiency of the market, not to any particular trader. They are content to establish rules of competitive trading—the antitrust laws in the domestic context, the World Trade Organization in the international context—and then to let the chips fall where they may, even if that means allowing present or future adversaries to, through legitimate means, build up competitive advantages that the United States is unable to overcome.

Strategy is consistent with competition when markets are filled with traders of atomic size, for then no amount of strategy can deliver a competitive advantage to any trader. But global markets, more even than domestic markets, are filled with traders of macroscopic size. Strategy then requires that each trader seek to gain and maintain advantages, undermining competition. The only way antimonopolists could induce the trading behemoth that is America to behave competitively, and to let the chips fall where they may, was to convince America voluntarily to give up strategy, to sacrifice self-interest on the altar of efficient markets.

And so they did.

Thus when the question arose whether to permit American corporations to move their manufacturing operations overseas, or to permit foreign companies to leverage their efficiencies to dominate a domestic industry and ensure that 90% of domestic supply would be imported from overseas, the answer the antimonopolists gave was: “yes.” Because it is efficient. Labor abroad is cheaper than labor at home, and transportation costs low, so efficiency requires that production move overseas, and our own resources be reallocated to more competitive uses.

This is the impeccable logic of static efficiency, of general equilibrium models allocating resources optimally. But it is instructive to recall that the men who perfected this model were not trying to describe a free market, much less international trade. They were trying to create a model that a central planner could use to allocate resources to a state’s subjects. What mattered to them in building the model was the good of the whole, not any particular part. And yet it is to a particular part of the global whole that the United States government is dedicated.

The Strategic Trader

Students of strategy would have taken a very different approach to international trade. Strategy teaches that markets are dynamic, and that businesses must make decisions based not only on the market signals that exist today, but on those that can be made to exist in the future. For the successful strategist, unlike the antimonopolist, identifying a product for which consumers are willing to pay the costs of production is not alone enough to justify bringing the product to market. The strategist must be able to secure a source of supply, or a distribution channel, that competitors cannot easily duplicate, before the strategist will enter.

Why? Because without an advantage in supply, or distribution, competitors will duplicate the product, compete away any markups, and leave the strategist no better off than if he had never undertaken the project at all. Indeed, he may be left bankrupt, if he has sunk costs that competition prevents him from recovering. Unlike the economist, the strategist is interested in survival, because he is a partisan of a part of the market—himself—not the market entire. The strategist understands that survival requires power, and all power rests, to a greater or lesser degree, on monopoly.

The strategist is not therefore a free trader in the international arena, at least not as a matter of principle. The strategist understands that trading from a position of strength can enrich, and trading from a position of weakness can impoverish. And to occupy that position of strength, America must, like any monopolist, control supply. Moreover, in the constantly-innovating markets that characterize industrial economies, markets in which innovation emerges from learning by doing, control over physical supply translates into control over the supply of inventions itself.

The strategist does not permit domestic corporations to offshore manufacturing in any market in which the strategist wishes to participate, because that is unsafe: foreign countries could use control over that supply to extract rents from America, to drive domestic firms to bankruptcy, and to gain control over the supply of inventions.

And, as the new trade theorists belatedly discovered, offshoring prevents the development of the dense, geographically-contiguous, supply networks that confer power over whole product categories, such as the electronics hub in Zhengzhou, where iPhone-maker Foxconn is located.

Or the pharmaceutical hub in Hubei.

Coronavirus and the Failure of Free Trade

Today, America is unprepared for the coming wave of coronavirus cases because the antimonopolists running our trade policy do not understand the importance of controlling supply. There is a shortage of masks, because China makes half of the world’s masks, and the Chinese have cut off supply, the state having forbidden even non-Chinese companies that offshored mask production from shipping home masks for which American customers have paid. Not only that, but in January China bought up most of the world’s existing supply of masks, with free-trade-obsessed governments standing idly by as the clock ticked down to their own domestic outbreaks.  

New York State, which lies at the epicenter of the crisis, has agreed to pay five times the market price for foreign supply. That’s not because the cost of making masks has risen, but because sellers are rationing with price. Which is to say: using their control over supply to beggar the state. Moreover, domestic mask makers report that they cannot ramp up production because of a lack of supply of raw materials, some of which are actually made in Wuhan, China. That’s the kind of problem that does not arise when restrictions on offshoring allow manufacturing hubs to develop domestically.

But a shortage of masks is just the beginning. Once a vaccine is developed, the race will be on to manufacture it, and America controls less than 30% of the manufacturing facilities that supply pharmaceuticals to American markets. Indeed, just about the only virus-relevant industries in which we do not have a real capacity shortage today are food and toilet paper, panic buying notwithstanding. Because fortunately for us antimonopolists could not find a way to offshore California and Oregon. If they could have, they surely would have, since both agriculture and timber are labor-intensive industries.

President Trump’s failed attempt to buy a German drug company working on a coronavirus vaccine shows just how damaging free market ideology has been to national security: as Trump should have anticipated given his resistance to the antimonopolists’ approach to trade, the German government nipped the deal in the bud. When an economic agent has market power, the agent can pick its prices, or refuse to sell at all. Only in general equilibrium fantasy is everything for sale, and at a competitive price to boot.

The trouble is: American policymakers, perhaps more than those in any other part of the world, continue to act as though that fantasy were real.

Failures Left and Right

America’s coronavirus predicament is rich with intellectual irony.

Progressives resist free trade ideology, largely out of concern for the effects of trade on American workers. But they seem not to have realized that in doing so they are actually embracing strategy, at least for the benefit of labor.

As a result, progressives simultaneously reject the approach to industrial organization economics that underpins strategic thinking in business: Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, which holds that strategic behavior by firms seeking to achieve and maintain monopolies is ultimately good for society, because it leads to a technological arms race as firms strive to improve supply, distribution, and indeed product quality, in ways that competitors cannot reproduce.

Even if progressives choose to reject Schumpeter’s argument that strategy makes society better off—a proposition that is particularly suspect at the international level, where the availability of tanks ensures that the creative destruction is not always creative—they have much to learn from his focus on the economics of survival.

By the same token, conservatives embrace Schumpeter in arguing for less antitrust enforcement in domestic markets, all the while advocating free trade at the international level and savaging governments for using dumping and tariffs—which is to say, the tools of monopoly—to strengthen their trading positions. It is deeply peculiar to watch the coronavirus expose conservative economists as pie-in-the-sky internationalists. And yet as the global market for coronavirus necessities seizes up, the ideology that urged us to dispense with producing these goods ourselves, out of faith that we might always somehow rely on the support of the rest of the world, provided through the medium of markets, looks pathetically naive.

The cynic might say that inconsistency has snuck up on both progressives and conservatives because each remains too sympathetic to a different domestic constituency.

Dodging a Bullet

America is lucky that a mere virus exposed the bankruptcy of free trade ideology. Because war could have done that instead. It is difficult to imagine how a country that cannot make medical masks—much less a Macbook—would be able to respond effectively to a sustained military attack from one of the many nations that are closing the technological gap long enjoyed by the United States.

The lesson of the coronavirus is: strategy, not antitrust.

In agriculture, antitrust, COVID-19-Response-Series, international trade, truth on the market , , , , ,
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Global Antitrust Institute Points the Way Toward Sounder Japanese Antitrust Guidelines

Alden Abbott —  4 May 2017

The indefatigable (and highly talented) scriveners at the Scalia Law School’s Global Antitrust Institute (GAI) once again have offered a trenchant law and economics assessment that, if followed, would greatly improve a foreign jurisdiction’s competition law guidance. This latest assessment, which is compelling and highly persuasive, is embodied in a May 4 GAI Commentary on the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s (JFTC’s) consultation on its Draft Guidelines Concerning Distribution Systems and Business Practices Under the Antimonopoly Act (Draft Guidelines). In particular, the Commentary highlights four major concerns with the Draft Guidelines’ antitrust analysis dealing with conduct involving multi-sided platforms, resale price maintenance (RPM), refusals to deal, tying, and other vertical restraints. It also offers guidance on the appropriate analysis of network effects in multi-sided platforms. After summarizing these five key points, I offer some concluding observations on the potential benefit for competition policy worldwide offered by the GAI’s commentaries on foreign jurisdictions’ antitrust guidance.

  1. Resale price maintenance. Though the Draft Guidelines appear to apply a “rule of reason” or effects-based approach to most vertical restraints, Part I.3 and Part I, Chapter 1 carve out resale price maintenance (RPM) practices on the ground that they “usually have significant anticompetitive effects and, as a general rule, they tend to impede fair competition.” Given the economic theory and empirical evidence showing that vertical restraints, including RPM, rarely harm competition and often benefit consumers, the Commentary urges the JFTC to reconsider its approach and instead apply a rule of reason or effects-based analysis to all vertical restraints, including RPM, under which restraints are condemned only if any anticompetitive harm they cause outweighs any procompetitive benefits they create.
  2. Effects of vertical restraints. The Draft Guidelines identify two types of effects of vertical non-price restraints, “foreclosures effects” and “price maintenance effects.” The Commentary urges the JFTC to require proof of actual anticompetitive effects for both competition and unfair trade practice violations, just as it requires proof of procompetitive effects. It also recommends that the agency take cognizance only of substantial foreclosure effects, that is, “foreclosure of a sufficient share of distribution so that a manufacturer’s rivals are forced to operate at a significant cost disadvantage for a significant period of time.” The Commentary explains that a “consensus has emerged that a necessary condition for anticompetitive harm arising from allegedly exclusionary agreements is that the contracts foreclose rivals from a share of distribution sufficient to achieve minimum efficient scale.” The Commentary notes that “the critical market share foreclosure rate should depend upon the minimum efficient scale of production. Unless there are very large economies of scale in manufacturing, the minimum foreclosure of distribution necessary for an anticompetitive effect in most cases would be substantially greater than 40 percent. Therefore, 40 percent should be thought of as a useful screening device or ‘safe harbor,’ not an indication that anticompetitive effects are likely to exist above this level.”

The Commentary also strongly urges the JFTC to include an analysis of the counterfactual world, i.e., to identify “the difference between the percentage share of distribution foreclosed by the allegedly exclusionary agreements or conduct and the share of distribution in the absence of such an agreement.” It explains that such an approach to assessing foreclosure isolates any true competitive effect of the allegedly exclusionary agreement from other factors.

The Commentary also recommends that the JFTC explicitly recognize that evidence of new or expanded entry during the period of the alleged abuse can be a strong indication that the restraint at issue did not foreclose competition or have an anticompetitive effect. It stresses that, with respect to price increases, it is important to recognize and consider other factors (including changes in the product and changes in demand) that may explain higher prices.

  1. Unilateral refusals to deal and forced sharing. Part II, Chapter 3 of the Draft Guidelines would impose unfair trade practice liability for unilateral refusals to deal that “tend to make it difficult for the refused competitor to carry on normal business activities.” The Commentary strongly urges the JFTC to reconsider this vague and unclear approach and instead recognize the numerous significant concerns with forced sharing.

For example, while a firm’s competitors may want to use a particular good or technology in their own products, there are few situations, if any, in which access to a particular good is necessary to compete in a market. Indeed, one of the main reasons not to impose liability for unilateral, unconditional refusals to deal is “pragmatic in nature and concerns the limited abilities of competition authorities and courts to decide whether a facility is truly non-replicable or merely a competitive advantage.” For one thing, there are “no reliable economic or evidential techniques for testing whether a facility can be duplicated,” and it is often “difficult to distinguish situations in which customers simply have a strong preference for one facility from situations in which objective considerations render their choice unavoidable.”

Furthermore, the Commentary notes that forced competition based on several firms using the same inputs may actually preserve monopolies by removing the requesting party’s incentive to develop its own inputs. Consumer welfare is not enhanced only by price competition; it may be significantly improved by the development of new products for which there is an unsatisfied demand. If all competitors share the same facilities this will occur much less quickly if at all. In addition, if competitors can anticipate that they will be allowed to share the same facilities and technologies, the incentives to develop new products is diminished. Also, sharing of a monopoly among several competitors does not in itself increase competition unless it leads to improvements in price and output, i.e., nothing is achieved in terms of enhancing consumer welfare. Competition would be improved only if the terms upon which access is offered allow the requesting party to effectively compete with the dominant firm on the relevant downstream market. This raises the issue of whether the dominant firm is entitled to charge a monopoly rate or whether, in addition to granting access, there is a duty to offer terms that allow efficient rivals to make a profit.

  1. Fair and free competition. The Draft JFTC Guidelines refer throughout to the goal of promoting “fair and free competition.” Part I.3 in particular provides that “[i]f a vertical restraint tends to impede fair competition, such restraint is prohibited as an unfair trade practice.” The Commentary urges the JFTC to adopt an effects-based approach similar to that adopted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in its 2015 Policy Statement on Unfair Methods of Competition. Tying unfairness to antitrust principles ensures the alignment of unfairness with the economic principles underlying competition laws. Enforcement of unfair methods of competition statutes should focus on harm to competition, while taking into account possible efficiencies and business justifications. In short, while unfairness can be a useful tool in reaching conduct that harms competition but is not within the scope of the antitrust laws, it is imperative that unfairness be linked to the fundamental goals of the antitrust laws.
  2. Network effects in multi-sided platforms. With respect to multi-sided platforms in particular, the Commentary urges that the JFTC avoid any presumption that network effects create either market power or barriers to entry. In lieu of such a presumption, the Commentary recommends a fact-specific case-by-case analysis with empirical backing on the presence and effect of any network effects. Network effects occur when the value of a good or service increases as the number of people who use it grows. Network effects are generally beneficial. While there is some dispute over whether and under what conditions they might also raise exclusionary concerns, the Commentary notes that “transactions involving complementary products (indirect network effects) fully internalize the benefits of consuming complementary goods and do not present an exclusionary concern.” The Commentary explains that, “[a]s in all analysis of network effects, the standard assumption that quantity alone determines the strength of the effect is likely mistaken.” Rather, to the extent that advertisers, for example, care about end users, they care about many of their characteristics. An increase in the number of users who are looking only for information and never to purchase goods may be of little value to advertisers. “Assessing network or scale effects is extremely difficult in search engine advertising [for example], and scale may not even correlate with increased value over some ranges of size.”
  3. Concluding thoughts. Implicit in the overall approach of this latest GAI Commentary, and in many other GAI assessments of foreign jurisdictions’ proposed antitrust guidance, is the need for regulatory humility, sound empiricism, and a focus on consumer welfare. Antitrust enforcement policies that blandly accept esoteric theories of anticompetitive behavior and ignore actual economic effects are welfare reducing, not welfare enhancing. The very good analytical work carried out by GAI helps competition authorities keep this reality in mind, and merits close attention.
In international, international competition, truth on the market
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Competition Policy for a New Administration

Alden Abbott —  23 November 2016

As Truth on the Market readers prepare to enjoy their Thanksgiving dinners, let me offer some (hopefully palatable) “food for thought” on a competition policy for the new Trump Administration.  In referring to competition policy, I refer not just to lawsuits directed against private anticompetitive conduct, but more broadly to efforts aimed at curbing government regulatory barriers that undermine the competitive process.

Public regulatory barriers are a huge problem.  Their costs have been highlighted by prestigious international research bodies such as the OECD and World Bank, and considered by the International Competition Network’s Advocacy Working Group.  Government-imposed restrictions on competition benefit powerful incumbents and stymie entry by innovative new competitors.  (One manifestation of this that is particularly harmful for American workers and denies job opportunities to millions of lower-income Americans is occupational licensing, whose increasing burdens are delineated in a substantial body of research – see, for example, a 2015 Obama Administration White House Report and a 2016 Heritage Foundation Commentary that explore the topic.)  Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department (DOJ) antitrust officials should consider emphasizing “state action” lawsuits aimed at displacing entry barriers and other unwarranted competitive burdens imposed by self-interested state regulatory boards.  When the legal prerequisites for such enforcement actions are not met, the FTC and the DOJ should ramp up their “competition advocacy” efforts, with the aim of convincing state regulators to avoid adopting new restraints on competition – and, where feasible, eliminating or curbing existing restraints.

The FTC and DOJ also should be authorized by the White House to pursue advocacy initiatives whose goal is to dismantle or lessen the burden of excessive federal regulations (such advocacy played a role in furthering federal regulatory reform during the Ford and Carter Administrations).  To bolster those initiatives, the Trump Administration should consider establishing a high-level federal task force on procompetitive regulatory reform, in the spirit of previous reform initiatives.  The task force would report to the president and include senior level representatives from all federal agencies with regulatory responsibilities.  The task force could examine all major regulatory and statutory schemes overseen by Executive Branch and independent agencies, and develop a list of specific reforms designed to reduce federal regulatory impediments to robust competition.  Those reforms could be implemented through specific regulatory changes or legislative proposals, as the case might require.  The task force would have ample material to work with – for example, anticompetitive cartel-like output restrictions, such as those allowed under federal agricultural orders, are especially pernicious.  In addition to specific cartel-like programs, scores of regulatory regimes administered by individual federal agencies impose huge costs and merit particular attention, as documented in the Heritage Foundation’s annual “Red Tape Rising” reports that document the growing burden of federal regulation (see, for example, the 2016 edition of Red Tape Rising).

With respect to traditional antitrust enforcement, the Trump Administration should emphasize sound, empirically-based economic analysis in merger and non-merger enforcement.  They should also adopt a “decision-theoretic” approach to enforcement, to the greatest extent feasible.  Specifically, in developing their enforcement priorities, in considering case selection criteria, and in assessing possible new (or amended) antitrust guidelines, DOJ and FTC antitrust enforcers should recall that antitrust is, like all administrative systems, inevitably subject to error costs.  Accordingly, Trump Administration enforcers should be mindful of the outstanding insights provide by Judge (and Professor) Frank Easterbrook on the harm from false positives in enforcement (which are more easily corrected by market forces than false negatives), and by Justice (and Professor) Stephen Breyer on the value of bright line rules and safe harbors, supported by sound economic analysis.  As to specifics, the DOJ and FTC should issue clear statements of policy on the great respect that should be accorded the exercise of intellectual property rights, to correct Obama antitrust enforcers’ poor record on intellectual property protection (see, for example, here).  The DOJ and the FTC should also accord greater respect to the efficiencies associated with unilateral conduct by firms possessing market power, and should consider reissuing an updated and revised version of the 2008 DOJ Report on Single Firm Conduct).

With regard to international competition policy, procedural issues should be accorded high priority.  Full and fair consideration by enforcers of all relevant evidence (especially economic evidence) and the views of all concerned parties ensures that sound analysis is brought to bear in enforcement proceedings and, thus, that errors in antitrust enforcement are minimized.  Regrettably, a lack of due process in foreign antitrust enforcement has become a matter of growing concern to the United States, as foreign competition agencies proliferate and increasingly bring actions against American companies.  Thus, the Trump Administration should make due process problems in antitrust a major enforcement priority.  White House-level support (ensuring the backing of other key Executive Branch departments engaged in foreign economic policy) for this priority may be essential, in order to strengthen the U.S. Government’s hand in negotiations and consultations with foreign governments on process-related concerns.

Finally, other international competition policy matters also merit close scrutiny by the new Administration.  These include such issues as the inappropriate imposition of extraterritorial remedies on American companies by foreign competition agencies; the harmful impact of anticompetitive foreign regulations on American businesses; and inappropriate attacks on the legitimate exercise of intellectual property by American firms (in particular, American patent holders).  As in the case of process-related concerns, White House attention and broad U.S. Government involvement in dealing with these problems may be essential.

That’s all for now, folks.  May you all enjoy your turkey and have a blessed Thanksgiving with friends and family.

In anticompetitive market distortions, antitrust, federal trade commission, international competition, Justice Department, truth on the market , , , ,
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ICN Advocacy Workshop a Success

Alden Abbott —  10 November 2016

On November 1st and 2nd, Cofece, the Mexican Competition Agency, hosted an International Competition Network (ICN) workshop on competition advocacy, featuring presentations from government agency officials, think tanks, and international organizations.  The workshop highlighted the excellent work that the ICN has done in supporting efforts to curb the most serious source of harm to the competitive process worldwide:  government enactment of anticompetitive regulatory schemes and guidance, often at the behest of well-connected, cronyist rent-seeking businesses that seek to protect their privileges by imposing costs on rivals.

The ICN describes the goal of its Advocacy Working Group in the following terms:

The mission of the Advocacy Working Group (AWG) is to undertake projects, to develop practical tools and guidance, and to facilitate experience-sharing among ICN member agencies, in order to improve the effectiveness of ICN members in advocating the dissemination of competition principles and to promote the development of a competition culture within society. Advocacy reinforces the value of competition by educating citizens, businesses and policy-makers. In addition to supporting the efforts of competition agencies in tackling private anti-competitive behaviour, advocacy is an important tool in addressing public restrictions to competition. Competition advocacy in this context refers to those activities conducted by the competition agency, that are related to the promotion of a competitive environment by means of non-enforcement mechanisms, mainly through its relationships with other governmental entities and by increasing public awareness in regard to the benefits of competition.  

At the Cofece workshop, I moderated a panel on “stakeholder engagement in the advocacy process,” featuring presentations by representatives of Cofece, the Japan Fair Trade Commission, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  As I emphasized in my panel presentation:

Developing an appropriate competition advocacy strategy is key to successful interventions.  Public officials should be mindful of the relative importance of particular advocacy targets, as well as matter-specific political constraints and competing stakeholder interests.  In particular, a competition authority may greatly benefit by identifying and motivating stakeholders who are directly affected by the competitive restraints that are targeted by advocacy interventions.  The active support of such stakeholders may be key to the success of an advocacy initiative.  More generally, by reaching out to business and consumer stakeholders, a competition authority may build alliances that will strengthen its long-term ability to be effective in promoting a pro-competition agenda. 

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, has developed a well-thought-out approach to building strong relationships with stakeholders.  The FTC holds public publicized workshops highlighting emerging policy issues, in which NGAs and civil society representatives with expertise are invited to participate.  Its personnel (and, in particular, its head) speak before a variety of audiences to inform them of what the FTC is doing and of the opportunities for advocacy filings.  It reaches out to civil society groups and the general public through the media, utilizing the Internet and other sources of public information dissemination.  It is willing to hold informal non-public meetings with NGAs and civil society representatives to hear their candid views and concerns off the record.  It carries out major studies (often following up on information gathered at workshops and from non-government sources) in addition to making advocacy filings.  It interacts closely with substantive FTC enforcers and economists to obtain “leads” that may inform future advocacy projects and to suggest possible lines for substantive investigations, based on the input it has received.  It communicates with other competition authorities on advocacy strategies.  Other competition authorities may wish to note the FTC’s approach in organizing their own advocacy programs.  

Competition authorities would also benefit from consulting the ICN Market Studies Good Practice Handbook, last released in updated form at the April 2016 ICN 15th Annual Conference.  This discussion of the role of stakeholders, though presented in the context of market studies, provides insights that are broadly applicable more generally to the competition advocacy process.  As the Handbook explains, stakeholders are any individuals, groups of individuals, or organizations that have an interest in a particular market or that can be affected by market conditions.  The Handbook explains the crucial inputs that stakeholders can provide a competition authority and how engaging with stakeholders can influence the authority’s reputation.  The Handbook emphasizes that a stakeholder engagement strategy can be used to determine whether particular stakeholders will be influential, supportive, or unsupportive to a particular endeavor; to consider the input expected from the various stakeholders and plan for soliciting and using this input; and to describing how and when the authority will seek to engage stakeholders.  The Handbook provides a long list of categories of stakeholders and suggests ways of reaching out to stakeholders, including through public consultations, open seminars, workshops, and roundtables.  Next, the Handbook presents tactics for engaging with stakeholders.  The Handbook closes by summarizing key good practices, including publicly soliciting broad voluntary stakeholder engagement, developing a stakeholder engagement strategy early in a particular process, and reviewing and updating the engagement strategy as necessary throughout a particular competition authority undertaking.

In sum, properly conducted advocacy initiatives, along with investigations of hard core cartels, are among the highest-valued uses of limited competition agency resources.  To the extent advocacy succeeds in unraveling government-imposed impediments to effective competition, it pays long-run dividends in terms of enhanced consumer welfare, greater economic efficiency, and more robust economic growth.  Let us hope that governments around the world (including, of course, the United States Government) keep this in mind in making resource commitments and setting priorities for their competition agencies.

In antitrust, competition advocacy, truth on the market , ,
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Global Antitrust Institute Propounds Recommendations for Reform of Japan’s Administrative Surcharge System

Alden Abbott —  8 August 2016

On August 6, the Global Antitrust Institute (the GAI, a division of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University) submitted a filing (GAI filing or filing) in response to the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s (JFTC’s) consultation on reforms to the Japanese system of administrative surcharges assessed for competition law violations (see here for a link to the GAI’s filing).  The GAI’s outstanding filing was authored by GAI Director Koren Wong Ervin and Professors Douglas Ginsburg, Joshua Wright, and Bruce Kobayashi of the Scalia Law School.

The GAI filing’s three sets of major recommendations, set forth in italics, are as follows:

(1)   Due Process

 While the filing recognizes that the process may vary depending on the jurisdiction, the filing strongly urges the JFTC to adopt the core features of a fair and transparent process, including:   

(a)        Legal representation for parties under investigation, allowing the participation of local and foreign counsel of the parties’ choosing;

(b)        Notifying the parties of the legal and factual bases of an investigation and sharing the evidence on which the agency relies, including any exculpatory evidence and excluding only confidential business information;

(c)        Direct and meaningful engagement between the parties and the agency’s investigative staff and decision-makers;

(d)        Allowing the parties to present their defense to the ultimate decision-makers; and

(e)        Ensuring checks and balances on agency decision-making, including meaningful access to independent courts.

(2)   Calculation of Surcharges

The filing agrees with the JFTC that Japan’s current inflexible system of surcharges is unlikely to accurately reflect the degree of economic harm caused by anticompetitive practices.  As a general matter, the filing recommends that under Japan’s new surcharge system, surcharges imposed should rely upon economic analysis, rather than using sales volume as a proxy, to determine the harm caused by violations of Japan’s Antimonopoly Act.   

In that light, and more specifically, the filing therefore recommends that the JFTC limit punitive surcharges to matters in which:

(a)          the antitrust violation is clear (i.e., if considered at the time the conduct is undertaken, and based on existing laws, rules, and regulations, a reasonable party should expect the conduct at issue would likely be illegal) and is without any plausible efficiency justification;

(b)          it is feasible to articulate and calculate the harm caused by the violation;

(c)           the measure of harm calculated is the basis for any fines or penalties imposed; and

(d)          there are no alternative remedies that would adequately deter future violations of the law. 

In the alternative, and at the very least, the filing urges the JFTC to expand the circumstances under which it will not seek punitive surcharges to include two types of conduct that are widely recognized as having efficiency justifications:

  • unilateral conduct, such as refusals to deal and discriminatory dealing; and
  • vertical restraints, such as exclusive dealing, tying and bundling, and resale price maintenance.

(3)   Settlement Process

The filing recommends that the JFTC consider incorporating safeguards that prevent settlement provisions unrelated to the violation and limit the use of extended monitoring programs.  The filing notes that consent decrees and commitments extracted to settle a case too often end up imposing abusive remedies that undermine the welfare-enhancing goals of competition policy.  An agency’s ability to obtain in terrorem concessions reflects a party’s weighing of the costs and benefits of litigating versus the costs and benefits of acquiescing in the terms sought by the agency.  When firms settle merely to avoid the high relative costs of litigation and regulatory procedures, an agency may be able to extract more restrictive terms on firm behavior by entering into an agreement than by litigating its accusations in a court.  In addition, while settlements may be a more efficient use of scarce agency resources, the savings may come at the cost of potentially stunting the development of the common law arising through adjudication.

In sum, the latest filing maintains the GAI’s practice of employing law and economics analysis to recommend reforms in the imposition of competition law remedies (see here, here, and here for summaries of prior GAI filings that are in the same vein).  The GAI’s dispassionate analysis highlights principles of universal application – principles that may someday point the way toward greater economically-sensible convergence among national antitrust remedial systems.

In antitrust, JFTC, truth on the market ,
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Global Antitrust Institute Comments on Chinese Draft Antitrust Guidelines Regarding Disgorgement and Fines Have Broader Implications for Sound Antitrust Enforcement Policy

Alden Abbott —  12 July 2016

The Global Antitrust Institute (GAI) at George Mason University Law School (officially the “Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University” as of July 1st) is doing an outstanding job at providing sound law and economics-centered advice to foreign governments regarding their proposed antitrust laws and guidelines.

The GAI’s latest inspired filing, released on July 9 (July 9 Comment), concerns guidelines on the disgorgement of illegal gains and punitive fines for antitrust violations proposed by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) – a powerful agency that has broad planning and administrative authority over the Chinese economy.  With respect to antitrust, the NDRC is charged with investigating price-related anticompetitive behavior and abuses of dominance.  (China has two other antitrust agencies, the State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC) that investigates non-price-related monopolistic behavior, and the Ministry of Foreign Commerce (MOFCOM) that reviews mergers.)  The July 9 Comment stresses that the NDRC’s proposed Guidelines call for Chinese antitrust enforcers to impose punitive financial sanctions on conduct that is not necessarily anticompetitive and may be efficiency-enhancing – an approach that is contrary to sound economics.  In so doing, the July 9 Comment summarizes the economics of penalties, recommends that the NDRD employ economic analysis in considering sanctions, and provides specific suggested changes to the NDRC’s draft.  The July 9 Comment provides a helpful summary of its analysis:

We respectfully recommend that the Draft Guidelines be revised to limit the application of disgorgement (or the confiscating of illegal gain) and punitive fines to matters in which: (1) the antitrust violation is clear (i.e., if measured at the time the conduct is undertaken, and based on existing laws, rules, and regulations, a reasonable party should expect that the conduct at issue would likely be found to be illegal) and without any plausible efficiency justifications; (2) it is feasible to articulate and calculate the harm caused by the violation; (3) the measure of harm calculated is the basis for any fines or penalties imposed; and (4) there are no alternative remedies that would adequately deter future violations of the law.  In the alternative, and at the very least, we strongly urge the NDRC to expand the circumstances under which the Anti-Monopoly Enforcement Agencies (AMEAs) will not seek punitive sanctions such as disgorgement or fines to include two conduct categories that are widely recognized as having efficiency justifications: unilateral conduct such as refusals to deal and discriminatory dealing and vertical restraints such as exclusive dealing, tying and bundling, and resale price maintenance.

We also urge the NDRC to clarify how the total penalty, including disgorgement and fines, relate to the specific harm at issue and the theoretical optimal penalty.  As explained below, the economic analysis determines the total optimal penalties, which includes any disgorgement and fines.  When fines are calculated consistent with the optimal penalty framework, disgorgement should be a component of the total fine as opposed to an additional penalty on top of an optimal fine.  If disgorgement is an additional penalty, then any fines should be reduced relative to the optimal penalty.

Lastly, we respectfully recommend that the AMEAs rely on economic analysis to determine the harm caused by any violation.  When using proxies for the harm caused by the violation, such as using the illegal gains from the violations as the basis for fines or disgorgement, such calculations should be limited to those costs and revenues that are directly attributable to a clear violation.  This should be done in order to ensure that the resulting fines or disgorgement track the harms caused by the violation.  To that end, we recommend that the Draft Guidelines explicitly state that the AMEAs will use economic analysis to determine the but-for world, and will rely wherever possible on relevant market data.  When the calculation of illegal gain is unclear due to a lack of relevant information, we strongly recommend that the AMEAs refrain from seeking disgorgement.

The lack of careful economic analysis of the implications of disgorgement (which is really a financial penalty, viewed through an economic lens) is not confined to Chinese antitrust enforcers.  In recent years, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shown an interest in more broadly employing disgorgement as an antitrust remedy, without fully weighing considerations of error costs and the deterrence of efficient business practices (see, for example, here and here).  Relatedly, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has determined that disgorgement may be invoked as a remedy for a Sherman Antitrust Act violation, a position confirmed by a lower court (see, for example, here).  The general principles informing the thoughtful analysis delineated in the July 9 Comment could profitably be consulted by FTC and DOJ policy officials should they choose to reexamine their approach to disgorgement and other financial penalties.

More broadly, emphasizing the importantance of optimal sanctions and the economic analysis of business conduct, the July 9 Comment is in line with a cost-benefit framework for antitrust enforcement policy, rooted in decision theory – an approach that all antitrust agencies (including United States enforcers) should seek to adopt (see also here for an evaluation of the implicit decision-theoretic approach to antitrust employed by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts).  Let us hope that DOJ, the FTC, and other government antitrust authorities around the world take to heart the benefits of decision-theoretic antitrust policy in evaluating (and, as appropriate, reforming) their enforcement norms.  Doing so would promote beneficial international convergence toward better enforcement policy and redound to the economic benefit of both producers and consumers.

In antitrust, antitrust penalties, international competition, truth on the market , ,
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The Mounting Costs of Antidumping Laws: Time for Action?

Alden Abbott —  23 May 2016

In a 2015 Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, I argued for a reform of the United States antidumping (AD) law, which allows for the imposition of additional tariffs on “unfairly” low-priced imports.  Although the original justification for American AD law was to prevent anticompetitive predation by foreign producers, I explained that the law as currently designed and applied instead diminishes competition in American industries affected by AD tariffs and reduces economic welfare.  I argued that modification of U.S. AD law to incorporate an antitrust predatory pricing standard would strengthen the American economy and benefit U.S. consumers while precluding any truly predatory dumping designed to destroy domestic industries and monopolize American industrial sectors.

A recent economic study supported by the World Bank and released by the European University Institute confirms that the global proliferation of AD laws in recent decades raises serious competitive concerns.  The study concludes:

Over a century, antidumping has gradually evolved from an obscure and rarely used policy tool to one that now constitutes an important form of protection not subject to the same WTO [World Trade Organization] controls as members’ bound tariff rates. Rather, antidumping is one of several instruments that allow members to exceed their bound tariffs, albeit subject to very detailed WTO procedural disciplines. Moreover, while the application of antidumping was until the WTO era mainly the province of a few traditional users, emerging markets have become some of the most active users of antidumping and related policies as well as important targets of their application. And though these policies are known collectively as temporary trade barriers, WTO rules governing the duration of antidumping measures are much weaker than for safeguards.

As antidumping use has evolved and proliferated (about 50 countries now have antidumping statutes although some are not active users), both its economic justification and the concerns raised by its possible abuse have also evolved. While the original justification of antidumping was to protect importing countries from predation by foreign suppliers, by the 1980s antidumping had come to be regarded as just another tool in the protectionist arsenal. Even more worrying, evidence began to mount that antidumping was being used in ways that actually enforced collusion and cartel arrangements rather than attacking anticompetitive behavior.

Today’s world economy and international trading system are much different even from those of the early 1990s, when this concern reached its peak. Some changes, in particular the significant growth in the number of countries and firms actively engaged in international trade, tend to limit the possibility of predation by exporters. Moreover, antidumping has developed a political-economic justification as a tool that can help countries manage the internal stresses associated with openness. But other changes, especially the important role of multinational firms and intra-firm trade and the increased use by many countries of policies to limit exports, suggest that concerns about anticompetitive behavior by exporters cannot be entirely dismissed. Vigilance to ensure that antidumping is not abused by complainants to achieve and exploit market power thus remains appropriate today.

In sum, the study reveals that anticompetitive misuse of AD law has become a serious international problem, but, because the potential still remains for occasional predatory use of dumping (China is discussed in that regard), what is called for is appropriate monitoring of the actual application of AD laws.

Building on the study’s conclusion, the best way of monitoring AD laws to ensure that they were employed in a procompetitive fashion would be the redesign of those statutes to adopt a procompetitive antitrust predatory-pricing standard, as recommended in my 2015 Backgrounder.  Such an approach would tend to minimize error costs by providing a straightforward methodology to readily identify actual cases of foreign predation, and to quickly reject unjustified AD complaints.

This in turn suggests that a new Administration interested in truly welfare-enhancing international trade reform could press for redesign of the WTO Antidumping Agreement to require that WTO-conforming AD laws satisfy antitrust-based predation principles.  Initially, a more modest effort might be to work with like-minded nations for the consideration of plurilateral agreements whereby the signatories would agree to conform their AD laws to antitrust predation standards.  Simultaneously, of course, the new Administration would have to make the case to Congress that such an antitrust-based reform of American AD law made good economic sense.

American AD reform along these lines would represent a rejection of crony capitalism and endorsement of a consumer welfare-based approach to international trade law – an approach that would strengthen the economy and ultimately benefit American consumers and producers alike.  It would also reinforce the role of the United States as the leader of the effort to liberalize international trade and thereby promote global economic growth.  (Moreover, to the extent foreign nations adopted the proposed AD reform, American exporters would directly benefit by being afforded new opportunities to compete in foreign markets.)

In antidumping, antitrust, international, international trade, truth on the market , , ,
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International Competition Network (ICN) 2015 Annual Conference: A Higher Profile for Competition Advocacy

Alden Abbott —  11 May 2015

The ICN’s 14 Annual Conference, held in Sydney, Australia, from April 28th through May 1st, as usual, provided a forum for highlighting the work of ICN working groups on cartels, mergers, unilateral conduct, agency effectiveness, and advocacy.  The Conference approved multiple working group products, including a guidance document on investigative process that reflects key investigative tools and procedural fairness principles; a new chapter for the ICN Anti-Cartel Enforcement Manual on the relationship between competition agencies and public procurement bodies; a practical guide to international cooperation in mergers; a workbook chapter on tying and bundling (more on this in a future Truth on the Market commentary); and a report on developing an effective competition culture.  Efforts to promote greater openness and procedural due process in competition agency investigations (a U.S. Government priority) – and to reduce transaction costs and unnecessary burdens in merger reviews – continue to make slow but steady progress.  The host Australian agency’s “special project,” a report based on a survey of how agencies treat vertical restraints in online commerce, fortunately was descriptive, not normative, and hopefully will not prompt follow-up initiatives.  (There is no sound reason to believe that vertical restraints of any kind should be given high enforcement priority.)

Most significant from a consumer welfare standard, however, were the signs that competition advocacy is being given a higher profile within the ICN.  Competition advocacy seeks to dismantle, or prevent the creation of new, government regulations that harm the competitive process, such as rules that create barriers to entry or other inefficiencies that have a disparate impact on differently-situated firms.  The harm stemming from such distortions (described as “anticompetitive market distortions” or “ACMDs” in the recent literature) swamps the effects of purely private restraints, and merits the highest priority from public officials who seek to promote consumer welfare.  In the plenary event on the Conference’s closing day (moderated by former UK Office of Fair Trading head John Fingleton), the leaders of the competition agencies of France, Mexico, and Singapore, joined by an Italian Competition Commissioner, addressed the theme of “credible advocacy,” specifically, means by which competition agencies can highlight the harm from government impediments to competition.  Representatives of the World Bank and OECD participated in the Sydney Conference discussions of competition advocacy, reflecting a growing interest in this topic by international economic institutions.  The newly approved ICN report on developing a competition culture pointed the way toward promoting greater public acceptance of procompetitive policies – a prerequisite for the broad-scale dismantling of existing (and blocking of newly proposed) ACMDs.

Notably, in a follow-up breakout session on advocacy toward policymakers, former Mexican competition chief (and head of the ICN Executive Steering Committee) Eduardo Perez Motta cited the example of his agency’s convincing the Mexican Commerce Ministry not to adopt new non-tariff barriers that would have effectively blocked steel imports – a result that would have imposed major harm on both Mexican businesses that utilize steel inputs and many ultimate consumers.  (The proposed steel restraint, a prime example of an ACMD, represented a manifestation of crony capitalism – a growing problem in industrialized economies, including the United States.)  This example vividly demonstrates that competition agencies may occasionally prove successful in the fight to curb ACMDs (and crony capitalism in general), if they have sufficient political influence and are given the correct tools to spot and highlight for the public the costs of such harmful government restraints.

A powerful way to build public support against ACMDs is to highlight their costs.  Scholars from Babson College (Shanker Singham and Srinivasa Rangan), Northeastern University (Robert Bradley), and I have developed a metric that seeks to estimate the negative effects of ACMDs on national productivity.  Our paper, which presents quantitative estimates on how various institutional factors affect productivity, draws upon existing indices of economic liberty, including the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index, the Fraser Index, and the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom.  We will present this paper at a World Bank-OECD Conference on Competition Policy, Shared Prosperity and Inclusive Growth, to be held next month at World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C.  (Hopefully this will lead to annual joint World Bank-OECD conferences exploring this topic.)  Stay tuned for additional information on ongoing efforts by the ICN and other international economic institutions to bolster competition advocacy – and for more details on my co-authored paper.

In anticompetitive market distortions, antitrust , , ,
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