An Offer You Can’t Refuse: Naked Exclusion, Refusal to Deal, and Exclusive Contracts
نویسنده
چکیده
An Offer You Can’t Refuse: Naked Exclusion, Refusal to Deal, and Exclusive Contracts Robert Kulick1 We introduce a model of anticompetitive exclusive dealing that provides a unified treatment of two of the major categories of potentially anticompetitive single-firm conduct recognized by the FTC: refusal to deal and exclusive purchase agreements. The exclusionary mechanism succeeds by turning the incentives of a pivotal buyer or a pivotal coalition of buyers against the incentives of the group when buyers attempt to coordinate on their preferred equilibrium. However, since all buyers acquiesce to the exclusionary strategy, no pivotal buyer or pivotal coalition of buyers emerges that can gain a competitive advantage and all buyers are strictly worse off. We argue that this approach provides a simple economic framework for evaluating a number of real-world antitrust cases, including the seminal cases Lorain Journal and Denstply, which do not fit neatly into the structure of the main body of economic research focused on exclusive dealing, the Naked Exclusion literature. We then show that by redefining exclusive contracts, this approach can be embedded within a Naked Exclusion style model, yielding a number of new results with implications for both the economic literature on exclusive dealing and antitrust jurisprudence.
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