To quote this study :
Thibault Schrepel, “Predatory practices” in U.S. antitrust cases, Revue Concurrentialiste, June 2014
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This post is from our series dedicated to statistical analyses of antitrust law.
We called it: “Let’s Stat”.
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Here are the number of american antitrust cases which involve some “predatory practices”
Methodology:
- We entered the keywords “predatory” and “antitrust”/”sherman act” on WestLawNext search engine, and we then proceeded to some statistical adjustments.
Definition:
- Predatory practices: all uses by a company of its domination on a market A in order to hurt competitors on a market B.
Comments:
- Let’s be careful not to confuse predatory practices and anti-competitive practices. Predation is the very nature of competition and antitrust laws. They are, mostly, pro-competitive and benefitial to consumers.
- There is a slow but constant growing number of cases which involve predatory practices issues. This may mean that the Microsoft case of 2001 opened the minds.
- Our view is that many “predatory practices” are not well identified by judges. Courts tend to (almost) only see predatory pricing, or bundling, but many other predatory practices also exist, as predatory innovation, predatory publicity, predatory licensing, predatory exclusivity… Therefore, this graph could (and should have been) be much more impressive.
