Antitrust Economics for Lawyers, published by LexisNexis and written by CRA consultants and affiliated experts, is geared towards attorneys in antitrust practice. The book provides lawyers, partners, and associates with clearly explained economic concepts and discusses several important topics in antitrust economics.
The book focuses on three main areas: merger analysis, where some of the key issues are market definition (the delineation of the boundaries of the relevant antitrust market), unilateral effects (the assessment of the likely merger effects on the merging firms’ unilateral incentives to raise price), coordinated effects (the evaluation of the likelihood that a merger might lead to a price increase through coordinated action by firms within the relevant market), buyer power effects (the analysis of whether the merged firm might have increased monopsony power or increased bargaining power in upstream markets and of the corresponding competitive effects), and a new chapter explores whether AI predictions of outside factors, like market demand, can help firms with pricing decisions made by rational economic agents, ultimately leading to collusion; monopoly and exclusion, where the discussion covers the economics and legal implications of distribution and franchising agreements, the economic and legal distinction between market power and monopoly power, the economics of bundling and tying practices, and the economic analysis of contracts that reference rivals that compete against one (or both) of the contracting parties; and damages cases, where three important topics are the econometric methodologies used for estimating damages in price fixing cases, those used in class certification proceedings, and those used in a variety of cases where estimation is difficult due to endogeneity problems.
For more information on the 2023 edition of the book, click here.