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Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm's structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns -- yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny. This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust -- specifically its pegging competition to \"consumer welfare,\" defined as short-term price effects -- is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon's dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational -- even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors. This Note maps out facets of Amazon's dominance. Doing so enables us to make sense of its business strategy, illuminates anticompetitive aspects of Amazon's structure and conduct, and underscores deficiencies in current doctrine. The Note closes by considering two potential regimes for addressing Amazon's power: restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties. [web URL: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox]

Economists tend to see the market as a default option for social order and a role for government only when markets fail. Developing a convincing analysis of the role of government in economic processes, however, needs to start by considering government failure in its own terms. Drawing on insights from institutional economics, law and economics and the philosophy of law, emphasizing the necessity of rules for the economy, this paper develops the concept of government failure. The paper identifies and develops four different types of government failure. Government can set rules for economic processes and actors that are (1) too specific, (2) too broad, (3) that are arbitrary, or (4) that conflict with other rules it has set out to address other, related issues (possibly primarily non-economic). Government failure is illustrated in the context of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) law as it relates to Anti-Trust law.

Over the past decade, we have witnessed some early signs of progress in the battle against international bribery and corruption, a problem that throughout the history of commerce had previously been ignored. We present a model that we then use to assess progress in reducing bribery. The model components include both hard law and soft law legislation components and enforcement and compliance components. We begin by summarizing the literature that convincingly argues that bribery is an immoral and unethical practice and that the economic harm it causes falls most heavily on those least able to absorb it. The next section summarizes the main provisions of anti-bribery legislation including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the Organization for Eco nomic Development's Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Officials in International Business Transactions, the United Nations Convention Against Corruption and the laws of selected countries. We conclude this section with a discussion of the \"moral imperialism\" argument for not imposing Western laws and values on other cultures. The next section focuses on the roles played by NGOs including Transparency International (TI), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the International Chamber of Commerce. We review trends in enforcement and prosecution, including a review of the United States' enforcement processes, mechanisms for cross-border legal assistance, a discussion of the distinctive nature of FCPA cases, and an assessment of what the future holds for enforcement. The final section focuses on compliance processes for corporations aimed at reducing the risk of FCPA and related violations. This section also addresses the ethics of gift giving and \"grease\" payments. The article concludes with a summary and suggestions for further research. Throughout the article, we reference important bribery cases and include comments from several authorities who are on the front lines of the battle against international bribery.

  In February 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed on political question and act of state grounds consolidated antitrust actions by several gasoline retailers against several oil producing companies, including Aramco, Lukoil, and Getty. Judge E. Grady Jolly's opinion summarized the earlier proceedings and the panel's unanimous decision.

A key factor in the emerging relationship between law and economic globalization is how global competition now shapes economies and societies. Competition law is provided by those players that have sufficient \"power\" to apply their laws transnationally. This book examines this important and controversial aspect of globalization.

The interaction between economic growth and income distribution is examined using Kaleckian/post-Keynesian models in which there are lags in investment and in which the dynamics of income distribution between wages and profits depends on changes in power relations in both the labour market and goods market. By examining these two influences on distributional dynamics simultaneously, the relative strength of which can change over the growth process, it is shown that the growth-distributional dynamics can involve non-linearities, multiple equilibria and instability. The implications of policy-induced changes—including those in macroeconomic policy and labour market and antitrust policies—on aggregate demand and distribution are examined for both wage-led and profit-led growth regimes.

Although corruption is ubiquitous, attitudes toward it differ among countries. Until the 1997 OECD Convention, the U.S. had been one of the only two countries with an explicit extraterritorial anti-bribery law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977. The FCPA employs a two-pronged approach to control the supply side of corruption: (1) anti-bribery provisions; and (2) accounting (books and record and internal controls) provisions. I offer evidence, albeit indirect, to show that the FCPA had limited success. The OECD Convention adopts the same two-pronged approach, but, since it is a multilateral treaty, is likely to be more successful provided that enforcement is vigorous enough. The signatory nations effectively form a cartel to reduce the cost of doing business. As with any cartel, however, each multinational corporation has an incentive to deviate. Thus, the mutual enforcement of the agreement is crucial for its success. However, the two-pronged approach is not sufficient, since internal control does not adequately monitor decisions made at the top level. I argue that the two lessons drawn from the U.S. experience are: (1) law enforcement must be credible; and (2) internal controls alone are not sufficient. Stronger and more effective corporate governance within an appropriate regulatory framework is needed to ensure that multinational corporations conduct their business in an ethical manner.

We develop a general framework for computing cartel damages claims. We decompose a direct purchaser plaintiff's lost profits in three parts: the price overcharge, the pass-on effect and the output effect. The output effect is usually neglected: it is the lost business resulting from passing on the price overcharge. To evaluate the relative importance of the three effects, we introduce various models of imperfect competition for the plaintiff's industry. We show that the passing-on defense generally remains justified after accounting for the output effect, provided that the cartel affects a sufficient number of firms. We derive exact discounts to the price overcharge, and illustrate how to compute these in the European vitamin cartel. We finally extend our framework to measure the cartel's total harm, i.e., the total damages to direct purchasers and their consumers. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers

We study the effect of encouraging private actions for breaches of competition law. We develop a model of litigation and settlement with asymmetric information. We show that screening liable from non-liable defendants requires the Court to restrict the rules governing admissible evidence. We study how to design the rules so as to enhance the role of private litigation in antitrust enforcement and prove that increasing damages is better than reducing costs of initiating suits. We also find large benefits from introducing a system of compensation for defendants found non-liable, paid by unsuccessful plaintiffs. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers