Antitrust Bulletin articles from January 2004

Antitrust Bulletin archives from January 2004

Combining horizontal and vertical analysis in antitrust: the American Antitrust Institute's roundtable on the implications of the work of Robert L. Steiner.
January 1, 2004... I. Introduction For the past generation, informed primarily by economics and under the influence of the Chicago school of antitrust, U.S. antitrust policy has downplayed the competitive significance of vertical distribution relationships....

Vertical relations in antitrust: some intellectual history.
January 1, 2004... All politics is local. And all monopoly strategy is vertical in the sense that it affects the welfare, and perhaps the behavior, of agents located at different vertical stages in the chain of production and distribution. Thus, in asking me to...

Vertical relationships in distribution channels: a marketing perspective.
January 1, 2004... As Robert Steiner has emphasized, many traditional economic models of vertical relationships have either ignored the role of retailers and other channel members or characterized these channel members as atomistic firms passively following the...

The evolution and applications of dual-stage thinking.
January 1, 2004... I. Professor Bell! Professor Bell! In what I was later to call the single-stage approach to analyzing a consumer goods industry, the manufacturing sector is positioned as the industry and individual producers as the firms. The firms appear...

Why economists are wrong to neglect retailing and how Steiner's theory provides an explanation of important regularities.
January 1, 2004... I. Introduction For more than three decades Robert Steiner has been arguing that economists have neglected retailers and the competition between retailers and their manufacturer suppliers. (1) The most extreme form of neglect is to act as...

Using Steiner's dual-stage model to develop better measures of retail distribution.
January 1, 2004... I. Introduction Steiner's dual-stage model is an important conceptual tool for marketers and economists studying structure and performance in consumer markets. (1) Insights from the dual-stage model will help improve the design and...

Distribution matters.(importance of distribution to both economic analysis and antitrust policy)
January 1, 2004... I. Introduction The title of this article, "Distribution Matters," can serve as a shorthand representation or snapshot of the many contributions to economics made by Robert L. Steiner. Steiner has written extensively on a number of aspects...

An enforcement perspective on the work of Robert L. Steiner: why retailing and vertical relationships matter.
January 1, 2004... I. Introduction The question of why economists traditionally neglect retailing and the "competition" between retailers and manufacturers is of great interest to me in my enforcement role at the Federal Trade Commission. (1) The fundamental...

Steiner's two-stage vision: implications for antitrust analysis.
January 1, 2004... I. Introduction The primary insight of Steiner's two-stage vision is that vertical as well as horizontal economic relationships determine the final prices paid by consumers for most commodities. With this approach, we cannot ignore...

The implications of Robert L. Steiner's work for merger analysis.
January 1, 2004... I. Introduction Robert Steiner has advanced a number of innovative ideas about competition in "dual-stage" markets in which a retailer resells a manufacturer's product to final consumers. (1) These ideas include the following: 1. When...