Antitrust Bulletin articles from September 2000

Antitrust Bulletin archives from September 2000

A symposium on the changes in banking, with implications for antitrust.
September 22, 2000... Banking in the United States is currently experiencing major changes in underlying technologies and in some important tenets of public policy. Simultaneously, and partly in response to these changes, the U.S. banking system is undergoing a...

Competition in shifting product and geographic markets.(banking industry)
September 22, 2000... I. Introduction "How much the industry has changed" is a recurring theme of studies reviewing long-run developments in banking. Researchers claim that deregulation, consolidation, and financial innovation together have brought about a...

Defining banking markets according to principles recommended in the Merger Guidelines.(commercial banking)
September 22, 2000... The issue of how to define banking markets has been before policy makers for many years. The emergence in recent years of a host of new products and innovations has led many observers to argue that the distinction between commercial bank...

The competitive effects of the collective setting of interchange fees by payment card systems.(banking industry)
September 22, 2000... I. Introduction Consumers charged almost $1 trillion in purchases on payment cards in 1998, amounting to around 17% of all expenditures made by consumers for personal consumption that year.(1) Payment cards include credit, debit, and...

A new merger policy for banks.
September 22, 2000... I. Introduction Bank deregulation of the last two decades has been a victory over centuries-old governmental restraints aimed at protecting banks from competition in order to limit their exposure to risk. It has, in fact, launched a series...

Comment.
September 22, 2000... I. Introduction The two articles on which we comment represent quite different genres of public policy analysis. The article by Bernard Shull and Gerald Hanweck proposes a new policy for regulation of all bank mergers. The article by Dean...

The third relevant market.(downstream markets)
September 22, 2000... The third relevant market in antitrust, and more generally in any economic analysis of a consumer goods industry, is the downstream market(s) in which distribution firms resell the goods of manufacturers in the relevant product market to...

Physician networks, integration and efficiency.
September 22, 2000... I. Introduction The creation of physician networks has been an important part of the managed care revolution. A network is a panel of physicians whose members have contracted with a third-party payer to provide care for enrollers in the...

Predatory pricing standards: Is there a growing international consensus?
September 22, 2000... I. Introduction Predatory pricing is one of the most debated business practices in the industrial organization and competition policy literature. Intuitively, there seems nothing wrong with a low price since that is exactly what...

Comparative competition and the regulation of mergers in the water industry of England and Wales.
September 22, 2000... I. Introduction U.K. merger regulation is based on the premise that most merger activity is a part of the competitive process. In certain circumstances, the regulating bodies intervene in the merger decision by applying a public interest...