IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/rlecon/v1y2005i1n3.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Featuring the Three Tenors in La Triviata

Author

Listed:
  • Goldberg Victor P.

    (School of Law, Columbia University)

Abstract

In the "Three Tenors" case the FTC found an agreement to be an antitrust violation despite the fact that there was no way it could be anticompetitive. The Commission failed to heed the lessons of Coase's classic paper on the nature of the firm, making a sharp distinction between activities within a firm (legal) and across firm boundaries (not legal). Analytically, there should be no distinction. The decision to integrate activities by contract rather than ownership is a matter of relative transactions costs. Since the boundaries of the firm are, ultimately, an economic decision reflecting the costs and benefits of the alternative arrangements, there is no economic justification for making the legality of any act contingent upon whether it was on the proper side of that boundary. Nor is there any particular virtue in using antitrust rules to alter the relative costs so as to shift that boundary to favor bringing activities within the firm. The paper proposes a "quick look" approach. The first thing to look for is some indication of market power. If antitrust harm is not credible, as in this case, because there was no market power, stop looking.

Suggested Citation

  • Goldberg Victor P., 2005. "Featuring the Three Tenors in La Triviata," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 1(1), pages 55-64, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:rlecon:v:1:y:2005:i:1:n:3
    DOI: 10.2202/1555-5879.1009
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.2202/1555-5879.1009
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2202/1555-5879.1009?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Muris Timothy J, 2006. "Discordant Notes: A Reply to Professor Wright," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 1(3), pages 415-419, January.
    2. Wright Joshua D, 2006. "Singing Along: A Comment On Goldberg & Muris On the Three Tenors," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 1(3), pages 399-414, January.
    3. Witness Simbanegavi, 2006. "Informative Advertising: Competition or Cooperation?," Working Papers 033, Economic Research Southern Africa.
    4. Muris Tim, 2005. "A Response to Professor Goldberg: An Anticompetitive Restraint by Any Other Name . . ," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 1(1), pages 65-70, April.
    5. Witness Simbanegavi, 2009. "Informative Advertising: Competition Or Cooperation?," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(1), pages 147-166, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:rlecon:v:1:y:2005:i:1:n:3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.