Antitrust Economics 101

This course is intended to provide an introduction to microeconomics for antitrust practitioners.  Microeconomics is the study of how individuals and firms make decisions to allocate scarce resources and how these decisions impact the supply and demand of goods and service and determine relative prices. In the context of modern antitrust litigation, Professor Wright will focus on the key economic concepts underlying modern antitrust law, such as demand, substitution and income effects, elasticity, optimal pricing, price discrimination, supply, cost, consumer and producer surplus, cartel formation, and critical loss analysis.  Professor Wright’s course has significant professional and practical content for attorneys practicing in the antitrust and competition policy arenas, both domestically and abroad.

Suggested Reading

Muris, Timothy J., Improving the Economic Foundations of Competition Policy, 12 GEORGE MASON L. REV. 1 (2003),

Werden, Gregory J., Demand Elasticities in Antitrust Analysis, 66 ANTITRUST L.J. 363 (1998)

Spirit Airlines v. Northwest Airlines, Inc., 431 F.3d 917 (6th Cir. 2005)

U.S. v. AMR Corp., 355 F.3d 1109 (10th Cir. 2003)

FTC/DOJ Horizontal Merger Guidelines, § 4

Klein, Benjamin, and John Shepard Wiley, Competitive Price Discrimination as an Antitrust Justification for Intellectual Property Refusals to Deal, 70 ANTITRUST LAW JOURNAL 599 (2003)

Louis Kaplow and Carl Shapiro, Antitrust, in Handbook of Law and Economics (2007, Polinsky ed.), pages 1099-1121