The Antitrust Attorney Blog
The Internet didn’t fall down after my first post, so I thought I’d try another.
In the US, certain conduct is so obviously anticompetitive that antitrust law labels it per se illegal. These restraints lack redeeming pro-competitive value in almost all instances, so the law allows plaintiffs an important short-cut to pleading and proving such a claim.
The short-cut is that a plaintiff asserting a per-se-antitrust claim need not demonstrate anticompetitive harm. The law presumes such harm. This is huge because this element is one of the most difficult and expensive to prove.
Proving anticompetitive harm is often tough. Plaintiffs usually start by defining the relevant product and geographic markets. This is obvious is some cases; difficult and disputed in others.
Within that defined market, the plaintiff will then usually have to show market or monopoly power, then actual competitive harm in that market that exceeds any competitive benefits from the challenged restraint. It doesn’t always go like this, but that is the typical journey.
Proving all of this almost always requires expert economic testimony, which is—again—almost always disputed by defendants’ economic expert.
So this anticompetitive harm element can become quite burdensome and expensive. That is why fitting a case into a per-se-antitrust package is so valuable for a plaintiff, and risky for a defendant.
Price-fixing agreements usually come to mind as the prototypical per se antitrust violation (keep in mind that antitrust views agreements to limit volume as effectively the same thing). Other examples are market-allocation agreements and certain boycotts.
Let’s talk about market-allocation agreements—as price-fixing is a bit too obvious—so we can see how dangerously easy it is for this per-se-antitrust violation to develop.
Market allocation is an antitrust problem because competitors are agreeing not to compete. The most simple market-allocation agreement is geographic—“you take customers West of the Mississippi, and we will take the ones to the East.”
But sometimes it develops more subtly.