Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr Antitrust Series
Single-Firm Conduct: The Search for the Holy Grail of Administrable Procompetetive Standards
Abstract
During my tenure as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for International Enforcement in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, in a speech I delivered in London, in May 2002, I identified the regulation of single-firm conduct as the area of greatest divergence between U.S. and European competition policy. In the United States, led by the insights of the so-called Chicago School of economics, the courts have moved progressively toward an approach to single-firm conduct that has substantially narrowed the range of potential antitrust intervention. In Europe, by contrast, the courts appear to continue to take a more regulatory approach to the conduct of allegedly dominant firms especially in such areas as above-cost price discounting and access to what are sometimes called "essential facilities." I speculated (admittedly with little empirical support) that this difference in approach might be contributing to the slower rate of economic growth in Europe, and I called, therefore, for a transatlantic dialogue over the relative merits of our differing approaches.
Subject Area
Anti-Trust
Recommended Citation
William Kolaskly,
"Single-Firm Conduct: The Search for the Holy Grail of Administrable Procompetetive Standards"
(July 2005).
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr Antitrust Series.
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr Antitrust Series.
Working Paper 15.
http://law.bepress.com/wilmer/papers/art15
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