In this issue: For this holiday issue, we’re presenting the CPI Gift Bag—a collection of articles on a variety of themes with something for everyone. To start, Marc Levinson has both written and given us an interview on one of the strangest cases in antitrust history—the A&P case. The parallels to today are striking. Then […]

Marc Levinson, Dec 13, 2011 Accompanying Interview: Besides the article summarized below, we’re pleased to present an interview with Marc Levinson, author of the new book, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. Among the interesting topics he discusses are the similarities between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the anti-chain […]

Laura Atlee, Dec 13, 2011 When prosecuting cartel infringements, the European Commission (the “Commission”) most often builds its case on the basis of corporate leniency applications and documents. When the case reaches maturity and results in administrative fines being imposed on the companies implicated in the cartel, it then encourages affected consumers and customers to […]

Timothy Brennan, Dec 13, 2011 The continuing fire over how to assess the competitive effects of single-firm conduct received yet more gasoline in the wake of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) settlement of its antitrust case against Intel. The key issue in the case was whether Intel’s offering of “loyalty” discounts and other benefits […]

Ben Van Rompuy, Dec 13, 2011 When the EU leaders agreed on the final version of the Lisbon Treaty, one particular amendment caused turmoil in the European competition law community. The Lisbon Treaty suppressed the 50-year-old commitment to “undistorted competition,” embedded in the fundamental provisions of the Treaty establishing the European Community (‘EC’). According to […]

Alexander Kurdin, Andrey Shastitko, Dec 13, 2011 In this paper we consider the relationship between antitrust policy and intellectual property protection under the condition of poorly enforced intellectual property rights protection (despite their presumably strong protection on paper). This problem is a particular case of a more difficult and larger problem: interrelations between competition and […]

Paul Godek, Dec 13, 2011 Economic damages can arise from a variety of bad acts: a breach of contract, a patent violation, an oil-spill, or a price-fixing conspiracy, for examples. The calculation of economic damages involves the description of a “but-for world.” The but-for world implies a set of economic values-such as profits or quantities […]