Archives For Wright

Commissioner Wright goes down swinging over amendments to the FTC’s HSR rules

Geoffrey Manne —  1 July 2013

Last week, over Commissioner Wright’s dissent, the FTC approved amendments to its HSR rules (final text here) that, as Josh summarizes in his dissent,

establish, among other things, a procedure for the automatic withdrawal of an HSR filing upon the submission of a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announcing that the notified transaction has been terminated.

I discussed the proposed amendments and Josh’s concurring statement on their publication in February.

At the time, Josh pointed out that:

The proposed rulemaking appears to be a solution in search of a problem. The Federal Register notice states that the proposed rules are necessary to prevent the FTC and DOJ from “expend[ing] scarce resources on hypothetical transactions.” Yet, I have not to date been presented with evidence that any of the over 68,000 transactions notified under the HSR rules have required Commission resources to be allocated to a truly hypothetical transaction. Indeed, it would be surprising to see firms incurring the costs and devoting the time and effort associated with antitrust review in the absence of a good faith intent to proceed with their transaction.

The proposed rules, if adopted, could increase the costs of corporate takeovers and thus distort the market for corporate control. Some companies that had complied with or were attempting to comply with a Second Request, for example, could be forced to restart their antitrust review, leading to significant delays and added expenses. The proposed rules could also create incentives for firms to structure their transactions less efficiently and discourage the use of tender offers. Finally, the proposed new rules will disproportionately burden U.S. public companies; the Federal Register notice acknowledges that the new rules will not apply to tender offers for many non-public and foreign companies.

Given these concerns, I hope that interested parties will avail themselves of the opportunity to submit public comments so that the Commission can make an informed decision at the conclusion of this process.

Apparently none of the other commissioners shared his concerns. But they remain valid. Most importantly, the amendments were adopted without a shred of evidence to suggest they were needed or would be helpful in any way. As Josh says in his dissent:

It has long been accepted as a principle of good governance that federal agencies should issue new regulations only if their benefits exceed their costs….However, I have not seen evidence that any of the over 68,000 transactions that have been notified under the HSR Rules has resulted in the allocation of resources to a truly hypothetical transaction.

In the absence of evidence that the automatic withdrawal rule would remedy a problem that exists under the current HSR regime, and thus benefit the public, I believe we should refrain from creating new regulations.

For what it’s worth. the single comment received by the Commission on the proposed rule supported Josh’s views:

Although the rule may prevent such inefficiency in the future, it would also require companies to incur substantial costs in premerger negotiations and resource allocation while waiting for FTC approval during the HSR period. Currently, firms can avoid such costs by temporarily withdrawing offers or agreements until they are assured of FTC approval. Under the proposed rule, however, doing so would automatically withdraw a company’s HSR filing, subjecting it to another HSR filing and filing fee.

Presumably the absence of other comments means the business community isn’t too concerned about the amendments. But that doesn’t mean they should have been adopted without any evidence to support the claim that they were needed. I commend Josh for sticking to his principles and going down swinging.

In Antitrust & Competition, Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department, Regulation, Securities , , , , , ,
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Bringing the Error Cost Framework to the Agency: Commissioner Wright’s Proposed Policy Statement on Section 5 Unfair Methods of Competition Enforcement

Geoffrey Manne —  19 June 2013

Co-authored with Berin Szoka

FTC Commissioner Wright issued today his Policy Statement on enforcement of Section 5 of the FTC Act against Unfair Methods of Competition (UMC)—the one he promised in April. Wright introduced the Statement in an important policy speech this morning before the Executive Committee Meeting of the New York State Bar Association’s Antitrust Section. Both the Statement and the speech are essential reading, and, collectively, they present a compelling and comprehensive vision for Section 5 UMC reform at the Commission.

As we’ve been saying for some time, and as Wright notes at the outset of his Statement:

In order for enforcement of its unfair methods of competition authority to promote consistently the Commission’s mission of protecting competition, the Commission must articulate a clear framework for its application.

Significantly, in addition to offering important certainty to guide business actions, Wright bases his proposed Policy Statement on the error cost framework:

The Commission must formulate a standard that distinguishes between acceptable business practices and business practices that constitute an unfair method of competition in order to provide firms with adequate guidance as to what conduct may be unlawful.  Articulating a clear and predictable standard for what constitutes an unfair method of competition is important because the Commission’s authority to condemn unfair methods of competition allows it to break new ground and challenge conduct based upon theories not previously enshrined in Sherman Act or Clayton Act jurisprudence.

As far as we know, this Statement is the most significant effort yet to cabin FTC enforcement decisions within a coherent error-cost framework, and it is especially welcome.

Ironically, this is former Chairman Jon Leibowitz’s true legacy: His efforts to expand Section 5 to challenge conduct under novel theories, devoid of economic grounding and without proof of anticompetitive harm (in cases like Intel, N-Data and Google, among others) brought into stark relief the potential risks of an unfettered, active Section 5. Commissioner Wright’s Statement can be seen as the unintended culmination of—and backlash against—Leibowitz’s Section 5 campaign.

Particularly given the novelty of circumstances that might come within Section 5’s ambit, the error-cost minimizing structure of Commissioner Wright’s proposed Statement is enormously important. As one of us (Manne) notes in the paper, Innovation and the Limits of Antitrust (co-authored with then-Professor Wright),

Both product and business innovations involve novel practices, and such practices generally result in monopoly explanations from the economics profession followed by hostility from the courts (though sometimes in reverse order) and then a subsequent, more nuanced economic understanding of the business practice usually recognizing its procompetitive virtues.

And as Wright’s Statement notes,

This is particularly true if business conduct is novel or takes place within an emerging or rapidly changing industry, and thus where there is little empirical evidence about the conduct’s potential competitive effects.

The high cost and substantial risk of over-enforcement arising from unbounded Section 5 authority counsel strongly in favor of Wright’s Statement restricting Section 5 to minimize these error costs.

Thus, while the specifics matter, of course, the real import of Commissioner Wright’s Statement is in some ways structural: If adopted, it would both bring much needed, basic guidance to the scope of the FTC’s Section 5 authority; just as important, it would constrain (an important aspect of) the FTC’s enforcement discretion within the error cost framework, bringing the sound economic grounding of antitrust law and economics to Section 5, benefiting consumers as well as commerce generally:

This Policy Statement benefits both consumers and the business community by relying on modern economics and antitrust jurisprudence to strengthen the agency’s ability to target anticompetitive conduct and provide clear guidance about the contours of the Commission’s Section 5 authority.

For Wright, this is about saving Section 5 from its ill-defined and improperly deployed history. As he noted in his speech this morning,

In undertaking this task, I think it is important to recall why the Commission’s use of Section 5 has failed to date. In my view, this failure is principally because the Commission has sought to do too much with Section 5, and in so doing, called into serious question whether it has any limits whatsoever. In order to save Section 5, and to fulfill the vision Congress had for this important statute, the Commission must recast its unfair methods of competition authority with an eye toward regulatory humility in order to effectively target plainly anticompetitive conduct….. I believe that doing anything less would betray our obligation as responsible stewards of the Commission and its competition mission, and may ultimately result in the Commission having its Section 5 authority defined for it by the courts, or worse, having that authority completely revoked by Congress.

This means circumscribing the FTC’s Section 5 authority to limit enforcement to cases where the Commission shows both actual harm to competition and the absence of cognizable efficiencies.

The Status Quo

Both together and separately, we’ve discussed the problems with the Section 5 status quo in numerous places, including:

To summarize: The problem is that Section 5 enforcement standards in the unfairness context are non-existent. Former Chairman Jon Leibowitz and former Commissioner Tom Rosch, in particular, have, in several places, argued for expanded use of Section 5, both as a way around judicial limits on the scope of Sherman Act enforcement, as well as as an affirmative tool to enforce the FTC’s mandate. As the Commission’s statement in the N-Data case concluded:

We recognize that some may criticize the Commission for broadly (but appropriately) applying our unfairness authority to stop the conduct alleged in this Complaint. But the cost of ignoring this particularly pernicious problem is too high. Using our statutory authority to its fullest extent is not only consistent with the Commission’s obligations, but also essential to preserving a free and dynamic marketplace.

The problem is that neither the Commission, the courts nor Congress has defined what, exactly, the “fullest extent” of the FTC’s statutory authority is. As Commissioner Wright noted in this morning’s speech,

In practice, however, the scope of the Commission’s Section 5 authority today is as broad or as narrow as a majority of the commissioners believes that it is.

The Commission’s claim that it applied its authority “broadly (but appropriately)” in N-Data is unsupported and unsupportable. As Commissioner Ohlhausen put it in her dissent in In re Bosch,

I simply do not see any meaningful limiting principles in the enforcement policy laid out in these cases. The Commission statement emphasizes the context here (i.e. standard setting); however, it is not clear why the type of conduct that is targeted here (i.e. a breach of an allegedly implied contract term with no allegation of deception) would not be targeted by the Commission in any other context where the Commission believes consumer harm may result. If the Commission continues on the path begun in N-Data and extended here, we will be policing garden variety breach-of-contract and other business disputes between private parties….

It is important that government strive for transparency and predictability. Before invoking Section 5 to address business conduct not already covered by the antitrust laws (other than perhaps invitations to collude), the Commission should fully articulate its views about what constitutes an unfair method of competition, including the general parameters of unfair conduct and where Section 5 overlaps and does not overlap with the antitrust laws, and how the Commission will exercise its enforcement discretion under Section 5. Otherwise, the Commission runs a serious risk of failure in the courts and a possible hostile legislative reaction, both of which have accompanied previous FTC attempts to use Section 5 more expansively.

This consent does nothing either to legitimize the creative, yet questionable application of Section 5 to these types of cases or to provide guidance to standard-setting participants or the business community at large as to what does and does not constitute a Section 5 violation. Rather, it raises more questions about what limits the majority of the Commission would place on its expansive use of Section 5 authority.

Commissioner Wright’s proposed Policy Statement attempts to remedy these defects, and, in the process, explains why the Commission’s previous, broad applications of the statute are not, in fact, appropriate.

Requirement #1: Harm to Competition

It should go without saying that anticompetitive harm is a basic prerequisite of the FTC’s UMC enforcement. Sadly, however, this has not been the case. As the FTC has, in recent years, undertaken enforcement actions intended to expand its antitrust authority, it has interpreted far too expansively the Supreme Court’s statement in FTC v. Indiana Federation of Dentists that Section 5 contemplates

not only practices that violate the Sherman Act and the other antitrust laws, but also practices that the Commission determines are against public policy for other reasons.

But “against public policy for other reasons” does not mean “without economic basis,” and there is no indication that Congress intended to give the FTC unfettered authority unbounded by economically sensible limits on what constitutes a cognizable harm. As one of us (Manne) has written,

Following Sherman Act jurisprudence, traditionally the FTC has understood (and courts have demanded) that antitrust enforcement . . . requires demonstrable consumer harm to apply. But this latest effort reveals an agency pursuing an interpretation of Section 5 that would give it unprecedented and largely-unchecked authority. In particular, the definition of “unfair” competition wouldn’t be confined to the traditional antitrust measures — reduction in output or an output-reducing increase in price — but could expand to, well, just about whatever the agency deems improper.

Commissioner Wright’s Statement and its reasoning are consistent with Congressional intent on the limits of the “public policy” rationale in Section 5’s “other” unfairness authority, now enshrined in Section 45(n) of the FTC Act:

The Commission shall have no authority under this section or section 57a of this title to declare unlawful an act or practice on the grounds that such act or practice is unfair unless the act or practice causes or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers which is not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or to competition.

While not entirely foreclosing the possibility of other indicia of harm to competition, Wright provides a clear statement of what would constitute Section 5 UMC harm under his standard:

Conduct that results in harm to competition, and in turn, in harm to consumer welfare, typically does so through increased prices, reduced output, diminished quality, or weakened incentives to innovate.

This means is that, among other things, “reduction in consumer choice” is not, by itself, a cognizable harm under Section 5, just as it is not under the antitrust laws. As one of us (Manne) has discussed previously:

Most problematically, Commissioner Rosch has suggested that Section Five could address conduct that has the effect of “reducing consumer choice” without requiring any evidence that conduct actually reduces consumer welfare…. Troublingly, “reducing consumer choice” seems to be a euphemism for “harm to competitors, not competition,” where the reduction in choice is the reduction of choice of competitors who may be put out of business by a competitor’s conduct.

The clear limit on “consumer choice” claims contemplated by Wright’s Statement is another of its important benefits.

But Wright emphatically rejects proposals to limit Section 5 to mean only what the antitrust laws themselves mean. Section 5 does extend beyond the limits of the antitrust laws in encompassing conduct that is likely to result in harm to competition, although it hasn’t yet.

Because prospective enforcement of Section 5 against allegedly anticompetitive practices that may turn out not to be harmful imposes significant costs, Wright very nicely here also incorporates an error cost approach, requiring a showing of greater harm where the risk of harm is lower:

When the act or practice has not yet harmed competition, the Commission’s assessment must include both the magnitude and probability of competitive harm.  Where the probability of competitive harm is smaller, the Commission will not find an unfair method of competition without reason to believe the act or practice poses a risk of substantial harm.

In this category are the uncontroversial “invitation to collude” cases long agreed by just about everyone to be within the ambit of Section 5. But Commissioner Wright also suggests Section 5 is appropriate to prevent

the use by a firm of unfair methods of competition to acquire market power that does not yet rise to the level of monopoly power necessary for a violation of the Sherman Act.

This is somewhat more controversial as it contemplates (as the Statement’s illustrative examples make clear) deception that results in the acquisition of market power.

But most important to note is that, while deception was the basis for the Commission’s enforcement action in Rambus (later reversed by the D.C. Circuit), Commissioner Wright’s Statement would codify the important limitation (partly developed in Wright’s own work) on such cases that the deception must be the cause of an acquisition of market power.

Requirement #2: Absence of Cognizable Efficiencies

The real work in Wright’s Statement is done by the limitation on UMC enforcement in cases where the complained-of practice produces cognizable efficiencies. This is not a balancing test or a rule of reason. It is a safe harbor for cases where conduct is efficient, regardless of its effect on competition otherwise:

The Commission therefore creates a clear safe harbor that provides firms with certainty that their conduct can be challenged as an unfair method of competition only in the absence of efficiencies.

As noted at the outset, this is the most important and ambitious effort we know of to incorporate the error cost framework into FTC antitrust enforcement policy. This aspect of the Statement takes seriously the harm that can arise from the agency’s discretion, uncertainty over competitive effects (especially in “likely to cause” cases) and the imbalance of power and costs inherent in the FTC’s Part III adjudication to tip the scale back toward avoidance of erroneous over-enforcement.

Importantly, Commissioner Wright called out the last of these in his speech this morning, describing the fundamental imbalance that his Statement seeks to address:

The uncertainty surrounding the scope of Section 5 is exacerbated by the administrative procedures available to the Commission for litigating unfair methods claims. This combination gives the Commission the ability to, in some cases, take advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Section 5 by challenging conduct as an unfair method of competition and eliciting a settlement even though the conduct in question very likely would not violate the traditional federal antitrust laws. This is because firms typically will prefer to settle a Section 5 claim rather than going through lengthy and costly administrative litigation in which they are both shooting at a moving target and have the chips stacked against them. Such settlements only perpetuate the uncertainty that exists as a result of ambiguity associated with the Commission’s Section 5 authority by encouraging a process by which the contours of the Commission’s unfair methods of competition authority are drawn without any meaningful adversarial proceeding or substantive analysis of the Commission’s authority.

In essence, by removing the threat of Section 5 enforcement where efficiencies are cognizable, Wright’s Statement avoids the risk of Type I error, prioritizing the possible realization of efficiencies over possible anticompetitive harm with a bright line rule that avoids attempting to balance the one against the other:

The Commission employs an efficiencies screen to establish a test with clear and predictable results that prevents arbitrary enforcement of the agency’s unfair methods of competition authority, to focus the agency’s resources on conduct most likely to harm consumers, and to avoid deterring consumer welfare-enhancing business practices.

Moreover, the FTC bears the burden of demonstrating that its enforcement meets the efficiencies test, ensuring that the screen doesn’t become simply a rule of reason balancing:

The Commission bears the ultimate burden in establishing that the act or practice lacks cognizable efficiencies. Once a firm has offered initial evidence to substantiate its efficiency claims, the Commission must demonstrate why the efficiencies are not cognizable.

Fundamentally, as Commissioner Wright explained in his speech,

Anticompetitive conduct that lacks cognizable efficiencies is the most likely to harm consumers because it is without any redeeming consumer benefits. The efficiency screen also works to ensure that welfare-enhancing conduct is not inadvertently deterred…. The Supreme Court has long recognized that erroneous condemnation of procompetitive conduct significantly reduces consumer welfare by deterring investment in efficiency-enhancing business practices. To avoid deterring consumer welfare-enhancing conduct, my proposed Policy Statement limits the use of Section 5 to conduct that lacks cognizable efficiencies.

The Big Picture

Wright’s proposed Policy Statement is well thought out and much needed. It offers clear guidance for companies navigating the FTC’s murky Section 5 waters, and it offers clear, economically grounded limits on the FTC’s UMC enforcement authority. While preserving a scope of enforcement authority for Section 5 beyond the antitrust statutes (including against deceptive conduct that harms competition without any corresponding efficiency justification), it nevertheless reins in the most troubling abuses of that authority by clearly prohibiting the agency’s unprincipled enforcement actions in cases like N-Data, Google and Rambus, all of which failed to establish a connection between the complained-of conduct and harm to competition or else ignored clear efficiencies (particularly Google).

No doubt some agency watchers will criticize the Statement, labeling it reflexively deregulatory. But remember this isn’t being proposed in a vacuum. Commissioner Wright’s Statement defines only what should be a fairly narrow set of cases beyond the antitrust statutes’ reach. The Sherman Act doesn’t disappear because Section 5 is circumscribed, and the most recent controversial Section 5 cases could all theoretically have been plead solely as Section 2 cases (although they may well have failed).

What does change is the possibility of recourse to Section 5 as a means of avoiding the standards established by the courts in enforcing and interpreting the Sherman Act.

The Statement does not represent a restriction of antitrust enforcement authority unless you take as your starting point the agency’s recent unsupported and expansive interpretation of Section 5—a version of Section 5 that was never intended to, and doesn’t, exist. Wright’s Statement is, rather, a bulwark against unprincipled regulatory expansion: a sensible grounding of a statute with a checkered past and a penchant for mischief.

Chairman Leibowitz and Commissioner Rosch, in defending the use and expansion of Section 5, argued in Intel that it was necessary to circumvent judicial limitations on the enforcement of Section 2 aimed only at private plaintiffs (like, you know, demonstration of anticompetitive harm, basic pleading standards…)—basically the FTC’s “get out of Trinko free” card. According to Leibowitz, the Court’s economically rigorous, error-cost jurisprudence in cases like linkline, Trinko, Leegin, Twombly, and Brook Group were aimed at private plaintiffs, not agency actions:

But I also believe that the result, at least in the aggregate, is that some anticompetitive behavior is not being stopped—in part because the FTC and DOJ are saddled with court-based restrictions that are designed to circumscribe private litigation. Simply put, consumers can still suffer plenty of harm for reasons not encompassed by the Sherman Act as it is currently enforced in the federal courts.

The claim is meritless (as one of us (Manne) discussed here, for example). But it helps to make clear what the problem with current Section 5 standards are: There are no standards, only post hoc rationalizations to justify pursuing Section 2 cases without the cumbersome baggage of its jurisprudential limits.

The recent Supreme Court cases mentioned above are only the most recent examples of a decades-long jurisprudential trend incorporating modern economic thinking into antitrust law and recognizing the error-cost tradeoff. These cases have served to remove certain conduct (at least without appropriate evidence and analysis) from the reach of Section 2 in a measured, accretive fashion over the last 40 years or so. They have by no means made antitrust irrelevant, and the agencies and private plaintiffs alike bring and win cases all the time—and this doesn’t even measure the conduct that is deterred by the threat of enforcement.  The limits on Section 5 suggested by Commissioner Wright’s Statement are marginal limits on the scope of antitrust beyond the Sherman Act, Clayton Act and other statutes. There is nothing in the legislative history or plain language of Section 5 to suggest adopting a more expansive approach, in effect using it to undo what the courts have methodically done.

It is also worth noting that not only the antitrust laws, but also the the Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) prong of Section 5 exerts a regulatory constraint on business conduct, proscribing deception, for example, as a consumer protection matter—without having to prove the existence of market power or its abuse. This also forms a piece of the institutional backdrop against which Wright’s proposed Policy Statement must be adjudged.

Wright was a leading critic of the agency’s expansive use of Section 5 before he joined the Commission, both at Truth on the Market as well as in longer writing.  He has, correctly, seen it as a serious problem in need of remedying for quite some time. It is gratifying that Wright is continuing this work now that he is on the Commission, where he is no longer relegated merely to critiquing the agency but is in a position to try to transform it himself.

What remains needed is the political will to move this draft Policy Statement to adoption by the full Commission—something Chairman Ramirez is not likely to embrace without considerable pressure from Congress and/or the antitrust community. In the modest service of fulfilling this need, ICLE and TechFreedom intend to host later this year the first of what we hope will be several workshops on Commissioner Wright’s Statement and the broader topic of Section 5 enforcement reform. If the Commission won’t do it, the private sector will have to step in. For a taste of our perspective, check out the amicus brief we recently filed with FTC law scholars (Todd Zywicki, Paul Rubin and Gus Hurwitz) in the case of FTC v. Wyndham, which may be the first case to really test how the FTC uses is unfairness authority in consumer protection cases.

In Antitrust & Competition, Error Costs, Federal Trade Commission, Google, Intellectual Property, Justice Department, Law & Economics, Monopolization, Patent, Platforms, Regulation, Section 5, Standard Setting , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Wright is Right and Price-Cost Safe Harbors are Wrong: The Raising Rivals’ Cost Paradigm, Loyalty Discounts and Exclusive Dealing

Steve Salop —  7 June 2013

Guest post by Steve Salop, responding to Dan’s post and Thom’s post on the appropriate liability rule for loyalty discounts.

I want to clarify some of the key issues in Commissioner Wright’s analysis of Exclusive Dealing and Loyalty Discounts as part of the raising rivals’ costs (“RRC”) paradigm. I never thought that I would have to defend Wright against Professors Lambert and Crane. But, it appears that rigorous antitrust analysis sometimes makes what some would view as strange bedfellows.

In my view, there should not be a safe harbor price-cost test used for loyalty discounts. Nor should these discounts be treated as conclusively (per se) illegal if the defendant fails the price-cost test. Either way, the test is a formalistic and unreliable screen. To explain these conclusions, and why I think the proponents of the screen are taking too narrow approach to these issues, I want to start with some discussion of the legal and economic frameworks.

In my view, there are two overarching antitrust legal paradigms for exclusionary conduct – predatory pricing and raising rivals’ costs (RRC), and conduct that falls into the RRC paradigm generally raises greater antitrust concerns. (For further details, see my 2006 Antitrust L.J. article, “Exclusionary Conduct, Effect on Consumers, and the Flawed Profit-Sacrifice Standard.”) Commissioner Wright also takes this approach in his speech of identifying and distinguishing the two paradigms.

This raises the question of which framework is better suited for addressing exclusive dealing and loyalty discounts (that is, where the conduct is not pled in the complaint as predatory pricing). Commissioner Wright’s speech articulates the view that theories of harm alleging RRC/foreclosure should be analyzed under exclusive dealing law, which is more consistent with the raising rivals’ costs approach, not under predatory pricing law (i.e., with its safe harbor for prices above cost). (Incidentally, I don’t read his speech as saying that he has abandoned Brooke Group for predatory pricing allegations. For example, it seems clear that he would support a price-cost test in a case alleging that a loyalty discount harmed competition via predatory pricing rather than RRC/foreclosure.)

To understand which legal framework – raising rivals’ costs/exclusive dealing versus predatory pricing/price-cost test – is most relevant for analyzing the relevant competitive issues, I want to begin with a primer on RRC theories of foreclosure. This will also hopefully bring everyone closer on the economics.

Input Foreclosure and Customer Foreclosure

There are two types of foreclosure theories within the RRC paradigm — “input foreclosure” and “customer foreclosure.” Both are relevant for evaluating exclusive dealing and loyalty discounts. The input foreclosure theory says that the ED literally “raises rivals’ costs” by foreclosing a rival’s access to a critical input subject to ED. The customer foreclosure theory says that ED literally “reduces rivals’ revenues” by foreclosing a rival’s access to a sufficient customer base and thereby drives the rival out of business or marginalizes it as a competitor (i.e., where it lacks the ability or incentive to move effectively beyond a niche position or to invest to grow).

Commissioner Wright’s speech tended to merge the two variants. But, it is useful to distinguish between them. (I think that this is one source of Professor Lambert being “baffled” by the speech, and more generally, is a source of confusion among commentators that leads to unnecessary disagreements.)

In the simplest presentation, one might say that customer foreclosure concerns are raised primarily by exclusive dealing with customers, while input foreclosure concerns are raised primarily by exclusive dealing with input suppliers. But, as noted below, both concerns may arise in the same case, and especially so where the “customers” are distributors rather than final consumers, and the “input” is distribution services.

Analysis of exclusive dealing (ED) often invokes the customer foreclosure theory. For example, Lorain Journal may be analyzed as customer foreclosure. However, input foreclosure is also highly relevant for analyzing ED because exclusive dealing often involves inputs. For example, Judge Posner’s famous JTC Petroleum cartel opinion can be interpreted in this way, if there were solely vertical agreements.

Cases where manufacturers have ED arrangements with wholesale or retail distributors might be thought to fall into the customer foreclosure theory because the distributors can be seen as customers of the manufacturer. However, distributors also can be seen as providing an input to the manufacturer, “distribution services.” For example, a supermarket or drug store provides shelf space to a manufacturer. If the manufacturer (say, unilaterally) sets resale prices, then the difference between this resale price and the wholesale price is the effective input price.

One reason why the input foreclosure/customer foreclosure distinction is important involves the proper roles of minimum viable scale (MVS) and minimum efficient scale (MES). The customer foreclosure theory may involve a claim that the rival likely will be driven below MVS and exit Or it may involve a claim that the rival will be driven below MES, where its costs will be so much higher or its demand so much lower that it will be marginalized as a competitor.

By contrast, and this is the key point, input foreclosure does not focus on whether the rival likely will be driven below MVS. Even if the rival remains viable, if its costs are higher, it will be led to raise the prices charged to consumers, which will cause consumer harm. And prices will not be raised only in the future. The recoupment can be simultaneous.

Another reason for the importance of the distinction is the role of the “foreclosure rate,” which often is the focus in customer foreclosure analysis. For input foreclosure, the key foreclosure issue is not the fraction of distribution input suppliers or capacity that is foreclosed, but rather whether the foreclosure will raise the rival’s distribution costs. That can occur even if a single distributor is foreclosed, if the exclusivity changes the market structure in the input market or if that distributor was otherwise critical. (For example, see Krattenmaker and Salop, “Anticompetitive Exclusion.”)

At the same time, it is important to note that the input/customer foreclosure distinction is not a totally bright line difference in many real world cases. A given case can raise both concerns. In addition, customer foreclosure sometimes can raise rivals costs, and input foreclosure sometimes (but not always) can cause exit.
While input foreclosure can succeed even if the rival remains viable in the market, in more extreme scenarios, significantly higher costs inflicted on the rival could drive the rival to fall below minimum viable scale, and thereby cause it to exit. I think that this is one way in which unnecessary disagreements have occurred. Commentators might erroneously focus only this more extreme scenario and overlook the impact of the exclusives or near-exclusives on the rival’s distribution costs.

Note also that customer foreclosure can raise a rival’s costs when there are economies of scale in variable costs. For this reason, even if the rival does not exit or is not marginalized, it nonetheless may become a weaker competitor as a result of the exclusivity or loyalty discount.

These points also help to explain why neither a price-cost test nor the foreclosure rate will provide sufficient reliable evidence for either customer foreclosure or input foreclosure, which I turn to next.

(For further discussion of the distinction between input foreclosure and customer foreclosure, see Riordan and Salop, Evaluating Vertical Mergers: A Post-Chicago Approach, 63 ANTITRUST L.R. 513(1995). See also the note on O’Neill v Coca Cola in Andrew Gavil, William Kovacic and Jonathan Baker, Antitrust Law in Perspective: Cases, Concepts and Problems in Competition Policy (2d ed.) at 868-69. For analysis of Lorain Journal as customer foreclosure, see Gavil et. al at 593-97.)

The Inappropriateness of a Dispositive Price-Cost Test

A price-cost test obviously is not relevant for evaluating input foreclosure concerns, even where the input is distribution services. Even if the foreclosure involves bidding up the price of the input, it can succeed in permitting the firm to achieve or maintain market power, despite the fact that the firm does not bid to the point that its costs exceed its price. (In this regard, Weyerhaeuser was a case of “predatory overbuying,” not “raising rivals’ cost overbuying.” The allegation was that Weyerhaeuser would gain market power in the timber input market, not the lumber output market.)

Nor is a price-cost test the critical focus for assessing customer foreclosure theories of competitive harm. (By the way, I think we all agree that the relevant price-cost test involves a comparison of the incremental revenue and incremental cost of the “contestable volume” at issue for the loyalty discount. So I will not delve into that issue.)

First, and most fundamentally, the price-cost test is premised on the erroneous idea that only equally efficient competitors are worth protecting. In other words, the price-cost requires the premise that the antitrust laws only protect consumers against competitive harm arising from conduct that could have excluded an equally efficient competitor. This premise makes absolutely no economic sense. One simple illustrative example is a monopolist raising the costs of a less efficient potential competitor to destroy its entry into the market. Suppose that monopolist has marginal cost of $50 and a monopoly price of $100. Suppose that there is the potential entrant has costs of $75. If the entry were to occur, the market price would fall. Entry of the less efficient rival imposes a competitive constraint on the monopolist. Thus, the entry clearly would benefit consumers. (And, it clearly often would raise total welfare as well.) It is hard to see why antitrust should permit this type of exclusionary conduct.

It is also unlikely that antitrust law would allow this conduct. For example, Lorain Journal is probably pretty close to this hypothetical. WEOL likely was not equally efficient. The hypothetical probably also fits Microsoft pretty well.

Second, the price-cost test does not make economic sense in the case of the equally efficient rival either. Even if the competitor is equally efficient, bidding for exclusives or near-exclusives through loyalty discounts often does not take place on a level playing field. There are several reasons for this. One reason is that the dominant firm may tie up customers or input providers before the competitors even arrive on the scene or are in a position to counterbid. A second reason is that the exclusive may be worth more to the dominant firm because it will allow it to maintain market power, whereas the entrant would only be able to obtain more competitive profits. In this sense, the dominant firm is “purchasing market power” as well as purchasing distribution. (This point is straightforward to explain with an example. Suppose that the dominant firm is earning monopoly profits of $200, which would be maintained if it deters the entry of the new competitor. Suppose that successful entry by the equally efficient competitor would lead to the dominant firm and the entrant both earning profits of $70. In this example, the entrant would be unwilling to bid more than $70 for the distribution. But, the dominant firm would be willing to bid up to $130, the difference between its monopoly profits of $200 and the duopoly profits of $70.) A third reason is that customers may not be willing to take the risk that the entry will fail, where failure can occur not because the entrant’s product is inferior but simply because other customers take the exclusive deal from the dominant firm. In this case, a fear that the entrant would fail could become a self-fulfilling prophecy because the customers cannot coordinate their responses to the dominant firms’ offer. Lorain Journal may provide an illustrative example of this self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon. This last point highlights a more general point Commissioner Wright made in his speech — that successful and harmful RRC does not require a below-cost price (net of discounts). When distributors cannot coordinate their responses to the dominant firm’s offer, a relatively small discount might be all that is required to purchase exclusion. Thus, while large discounts might accompany RRC conduct, that need not be the case. These latter reasons also explain why there can be successful foreclosure even when contracts have short duration.

Third, as noted above, customer foreclosure may raise rivals’ costs when there are economies of scale. The higher costs of the foreclosed rivals are not well accounted for by the price-cost test.

Fourth, as stressed by Joe Farrell, the price-cost test ignores the fact that loyalty discounts triggered by market share may deter a customer’s purchases from a rival that do not even come at the expense of the dominant firm. (For example, suppose in light of the discounts, the customer is purchasing 90 units from the dominant firm and 10 from the rival in order to achieve a “reward” that comes from purchasing 90% from the dominant firm. Now suppose that entrant offers a new product that would lead the customer to wish to continue to purchase 90 units from the dominant firm but now purchase 15 units from the rival. The purchase of these additional 5 units from the rival does not come at the expense of the dominant firm. Yet, even if the entrant were to offer the 5 units at cost, these purchases would be deterred because the customer would fall below the 90% trigger for the reward.) In this way, the market share discount can directly reduce output.

Fifth, the price-cost test assumes that the price decreases will be passed on to final consumers. This may be the clear where the exclusives or loyalty discounts are true discounts given to final consumers. But, it may not be the case where the dominant firm is acquiring the loyalty from input suppliers, including distributors who then resell to final consumers. The loyalty discounts often involve lump sum payments, which raises questions about pass-on, at least in the short-run.

Finally, it is important to stress that the price-cost test for loyalty discounts assumes that price actually represents a true discount. I expect that this assumption is the starting point for commentators who give priority to the price-cost test. However, the price may not represent a true discount in fact, or the size of the discount may turn out to be smaller than it appears after the “but-for world” is evaluated. That is, the proponents of a price-cost test have the following type of scenario in mind. The dominant firm is initially charging the monopoly price of $100. In the face of competition, the dominant firm offers a lower price of (say) $95 to customers that will accept exclusivity, and the customers accept the exclusivity in order to obtain the $5 discount. (To illustrate, suppose that absent the exclusive, the customers would purchase 90 units from the dominant firm at $100 for total revenue of $9000. With the exclusive, they purchase 100 units at a price of $95 for total revenue of $9500.
Thus, the dominant firm earns incremental revenue of $500 on the 10 incremental units, or $50 per unit. If the dominant firm’s costs are $50 or less, it will pass the price-cost test.) But, consider next the following alternative scenario. The dominant firm offers the original $100 price to those customers that will accept exclusivity, and sets a higher “penalty” price of $105 to customers that purchase non-exclusively from the competitor. In this latter scenario, the $5 discount similarly may drive customers to accept the exclusive. These prices would lead to a similar outcome of the price-cost test. (To illustrate, suppose that absent the exclusive, the customers would purchase 90 units from the dominant firm at $105 for total revenue of $9450. With the exclusive, they purchase 100 units at a price of $100 for total revenue of $10,000. Thus, the dominant firm earns revenue of $550 on the 10 incremental units, or $55 per unit. Here, the dominant firm will pass the price-cost test, if its costs are $55 or less.) However, in this latter scenario, it is noteworthy that the use of the “penalty” price eliminates any benefits to consumers. This issue seems to be overlooked by Crane and Lambert. (For further details of the role of the penalty price in the context of bundled discounts, see Barry Nalebuff’s articles on Exclusionary Bundling and the articles of Greenlee, Reitman and Sibley.)

* * *

For all these reasons, treating loyalty discounts as analogous to predatory pricing and thereby placing over-reliance on a price-cost test represents a formalistic and unreliable antitrust approach. (It is ironic that Commissioner Wright was criticized by Professor Lambert for being formalistic, when the facts are the opposite.)

This analysis is not to say that the court should be indifferent to the lower prices, where there is a true discount. To the contrary, lower prices passed-on would represent procompetitive efficiency benefits. But, the potential for lower prices passed-on does not provide a sufficient basis for adopting a price-cost safe harbor test for loyalty discount allegations, even ones that can be confidently characterized as purely plain vanilla customer foreclosure with no effects on rivals’ costs.

Thus, the price-cost test should be one relevant evidentiary factor. But, it should not be the primary factor or a trump for either side. That is, above-cost pricing (measured in terms of incremental revenue less than incremental cost) should not be sufficient by itself for the defendant to escape liability. Nor should below-cost pricing (again, measured in terms of incremental revenue less than incremental cost) should not be a sufficient by itself for a finding of liability.

Such “Creeping Brookism” does not led to either rigorous or accurate antitrust analysis. It is a path to higher error rates, not a lower ones.

Nor should courts rely on simple-minded foreclosure rates. Gilbarco shows how a mechanical approach to measuring foreclosure leads to confusion. Microsoft makes it clear that a “total foreclosure” test also is deficient. Instead, a better approach is to require the plaintiff to prove under the Rule of Reason standard that the conduct harms the rival by reducing its ability to compete and also that it harms consumers.

I should add one other point for completeness. Some (but not Commissioner Wright or Professor Crane) might suggest that the price-cost test has administrability benefits relative to a full rule of reason analysis under the RRC paradigm. While courts are capable are evaluating prices and costs, that comparison may be more difficult than measuring the increase in the rivals’ distribution costs engendered by the conduct. Moreover, the price-cost comparison becomes an order of magnitude more complex in loyalty discount cases, relative to plain vanilla predatory pricing cases. This is because it also is necessary to determine a reasonable measure of the contestable volume to use to compare incremental revenue and incremental cost. For first-dollar discounts, there will always be some small region where incremental revenue is below incremental cost. Even aside from this situation, the two sides often will disagree about the magnitude of the volume that was at issue.

In summary, I think that Professor Wright’s speech forms the basis of moving the discussion forward into analysis of the actual evidence of benefits and harms, rather than continuing to fight the battles over whether the legal analysis used in the 1950s and 1960s failed to satisfy modern standards and thereby needed to be reined in with unreliable safe harbors.

In Antitrust & Competition, Exclusionary Conduct, Exclusive Dealing, Federal Trade Commission, Law & Economics, Monopolization , , , , , , ,
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