Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category

Antitrust and Innovation, Class 02: Overview of the U.S. Antitrust Laws

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

The review slides from this week’s class provide an overview of the U.S. antitrust laws and the key analytical distinctions, namely unilateral v. coordinated conduct, horizontal v. vertical agreements, inter- v. intrabrand restraints, direct (collusive) and indirect (exclusionary) effects. Enjoy!

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Antitrust and Innovation, Class 01: Growth, Productivity, Innovation

Monday, August 27th, 2007

Attached are the slides from today’s first class on Antitrust, IP, and Innovation. The goal is to put IP and AT policy in the much broader context of (macro-) economic growth, productivity, and investment in R&D. Here is the evolving syllabus for the course.

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Antitrust Aspects of Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions: Slides

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

I will be speaking at the American Law Institute’s Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions Seminar in Boston later this year. Here are the printed slides for my talk. (The live slides will be somewhat different.)

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Antitrust and Innovation: Syllabus for my Fall 2007 Course

Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

Here is the (draft) syllabus for the course on Antitrust and Innovation, which I will teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law this fall. While there are many excellent casebooks on antitrust on the one hand and IP on the other, there is precious little teaching material focusing specifically on the antitrust/IP interface. (One notable exception is Gary Myers, The Intersection of Antitrust and Intellectual Property (2007).) In selecting materials for the course, I tried to give roughly equal weight to:

  • Bedrock case law
  • Emerging case law (e.g., exclusion via DRM, DMCA)
  • Agency practice (e.g., IP2 report) and mainstream scholarship
  • Radical critics of the intellectual property regime.
Comments are very much appreciated.

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Antitrust News & Notes

Saturday, April 7th, 2007
  • StarbuckAlthough waaaaay off-topic, since Hanno is a big Battlestar Galatica fan, the best quote I have seen from an actor in years is from Katee Sackhoff, who plays Kara “Starbuck” Thrace on Battlestar Galactica. From the LA Times: “In the first minute of this interview, Sackhoff admitted that she was hung over, because, she said, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m stupid. I’d rather you think I’m, you know, a drunk.’”

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Antitrust Issues in IP Licensing

Saturday, October 21st, 2006

Here are the slides (in .pdf format) of a presentation I recently gave in Chicago on Antitrust Issues in IP Licensing.

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Antitrust Issues in Mergers & Acquisitions

Sunday, October 15th, 2006

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to give a talk on Antitrust Issues in Mergers & Acquisitions in Boston. Here are the slides in .pdf format.

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Theory and Practice of Merger Antitrust Law: Complete Set of Slides

Saturday, May 6th, 2006

Here is the complete set of summary slides for the class on merger antitrust law. The slides were made with Apple Keynote 3.0, Omni Graffle Professional 4.0, Comic Life, and Graphic Converter. The slides are published under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license, so please copy, use, remix, and distribute freely. Enjoy!

UPDATE: I fixed a couple of typos.

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Class 9: Unilateral Effects after US v. Oracle

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

Here are the summary slides relating to our discussion of US v. Oracle.

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Class 8: Coordinated Effects after FTC v. Arch Coal

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

The summary slides are up for download. What I like about the opinion is the court’s insistence on microfoundations for the FTC’s theory of competitive harm.

  • Will the merger lead to higher concentration? Yes, but so far the oligopoly in the Southern Powder River Basin has acted competitively and the FTC didn’t explain how exactly the merger would make coordination more likely.
  • Is pricing transparent? Some of it is, but the most relevant bid pricing is kept confidential by the suppliers and the utilities.
For further reading, I can recommend the comments of Andrew Dick, Michael Salinger, and Greg Werden on Arch Coal, and the comprehensive report on The Economics of Tacit Collusion by Marc Ivaldi, Bruno Jullien, Patrick Rey, Paul Seabright, and Jean Tirole.

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Class 7: The Merger Process

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Here are the summary slides for the class on the merger process. The focus on substantive merger law and the underlying economic theory makes it easy for students to lose sight of the fact that mergers don’t occur in the blink of an eye and that merger lawyers have to deal with a whole lot more than §7 analysis. The slides on gun jumping and information exchange are based on Bill Blumenthal’s excellent remarks on the rhetoric of gun jumping, which brought agency commentary back in line with best practices of the private bar. As to the practical aspects of the HSR process, check out these helpful guides and presentations.

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Class 6: Competitive Effects, Entry, and Efficiencies

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

Here are the summary slides for the class on competitive effects, entry, and efficiencies. The slides include materials to illustrate both the theoretical instability of cartels and their surprising resilience in the real world. Also included are illustrations of unilateral effects in markets for homogenous and differentiated products, as well as a discussion of the Staples case.

UPDATE (3/22/06): I added a summary slides for entry, efficiencies, and failing firms to wrap up the discussion of the merger guidelines framework.

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Class 5: Market Definition II; Market Concentration

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Here are the summary slides for the class on market concentration measures. The focus is on the improvements that the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) provides over the C4 concentration ratio, and a comparison between the “post-merger HHI/changes in HHI” grid envisioned by the 1992 Merger Guidelines and the much more relaxed standards applied by the agencies in the years 1999-2003.

UPDATE (3/13/06): Fixed a typo on slides 4 and 5.

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Class 4: Market Definition I (Relevant Markets, Market Participants)

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

These slides address key issues of the first step of the 1992 Merger Guidelines market concentration analysis (i.e., §1 of the Guidelines), namely the definition of the relevant market using the hypothetical monopolist + SSNIP test and the identification of the market participants. (Concentration measures will be discussed in the next lecture.) The slides also discuss the “remoteness” of market definition to the ultimate goal of figuring out whether a proposed merger will have adverse welfare effects, building on the ‘double inference’ model in the Gavil, Kovacic & Baker casebook.

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Class 3: Modifications to the Structural Presumption

Monday, February 20th, 2006

The development of the structural presumption after Philadelphia National Bank (1963) and the last major Supreme Court merger decision in General Dynamics (1974) is one of the more fascinating chapters in antitrust jurisprudence. There is probably no other area of the law where lower courts have departed from Supreme Court jurisprudence more radically over a period of about 30 years, without intervention from the Supreme Court or Congress. The tension between the body of modern (post 1975, or, more specifically, post 1982) lower court merger jurisprudence and the (1962-1975) Supreme Court merger jurisprudence gives many antitrust opinions its distinctive flavor in the form of extremely selective quotations. I am still amazed by then judge Thomas’ statement in U.S. v. Baker Hughes (1990) that

The Supreme Court has a adopted a totality-of-the-circumstances approach to the statute [§7 of the Clayton Act], weighing a variety or factors to determine the effects of particular transactions on competition.
You don’t have to be a particularly literal reader of precendent to realize that nothing of that sort can be found in any of the Supreme Court merger cases. Of course, the Supreme Court has embraced more modern economic teachings in Sylvania, BMI, and Kodak, among others, but still, that’s a long way from a “totality of the circumstances” approach to §7 of the Clayton Act. Here are the .pdf slides of our last class on the modifications of the structural presumption after PNB.

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