A Careful Examination of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster Merger

As great admirers of The Boss and as fans of live entertainment, we share in the popular dismay over rising ticket prices for live performances. But we have been asked as antitrust scholars to examine the proposed merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and we do so with the objectivity and honesty called for by The Boss’s quotes above. The proposed merger has been the target of aggressive attacks from several industry commentators and popular figures, but the legal and policy question is whether the transaction is at odds with the nation’s antitrust laws. One primary source of concern to critics is that Ticketmaster and Live Nation are two leading providers of ticket distribution services, and these critics argue that the merged entity would have a combined market share that is presumptively anticompetitive. We observe, however, that this transaction is taking place within a rapidly changing industry. The spread of Internet technologies has transformed the entertainment industry, and along with it the ticket distribution business such that a reliance on market shares based on historical sales is misleading. A growing number of venues, aided by a competitive bidding process that creates moments of focused competition, can now acquire the requisite capabilities to distribute tickets to their own events and can thus easily forgo reliance upon providers of outsourced distribution services. If self-distribution is an available and attractive option for venues, as it appears to be, then it is unlikely that even a monopolist provider of fully outsourced ticketing services could exercise market power. Ultimately, a proper assessment of the horizontal effects of this merger would have to weigh heavily the emerging role of Internet technologies in this dynamic business and the industry-wide trend towards self-distribution. The second category of arguments by critics opposing the merger rests on claims that vertical aspects of the transaction would produce anticompetitive effects. Indeed, Ticketmaster’s and Live Nation’s core businesses are in successive markets, and thus the proposed transaction is primarily a vertical merger, but there is broad agreement among economists and antitrust authorities that vertical mergers rarely introduce competitive concerns and are usually driven by efficiency motivations. This wealth of academic scholarship, which is reflected in current antitrust law, has not - from our vantage point - been properly incorporated into the public dialogue concerning the proposed merger. To the contrary, critics articulate concerns, including the fears that the merger would lead to the leveraging of market power and the foreclosure of downstream competition, that are refuted by accepted scholarship. Moreover, there are a number of specific efficiencies that, consistent with economic and organizational theory, are likely to emerge from a Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger and would be unlikely but for the companies’ integration. For these reasons, we submit this analysis in an effort to inform the debate with current economic and legal scholarship

27th European Congress of Arachnology, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2 - 7 September 2012

Recently 157 participants from 39 countries met in Ljubljana, Slovenia, for presenting, discussing and sharing arachnological topics. This was the 27th European Congress of Arachnology, held from the 2nd to 7th of September 2012

Bakke Betrayed

While it seems that a President who disagrees with the Supreme Court\u27s account of the Constitution faces only two choices--to enforce the Court\u27s decision or defy the Court and take his case to a skeptical populace--there is a third way in which the President can publicly embrace the doctrine in question, while at the same time refusing to follow it. Pres Clinton\u27s Administration has followed just such a third way approach to Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

Psychophysical evidence for two routes to suppression before binocular summation of signals in human vision

Visual mechanisms in primary visual cortex are suppressed by the superposition of gratings perpendicular to their preferred orientations. A clear picture of this process is needed to (i) inform functional architecture of image-processing models, (ii) identify the pathways available to support binocular rivalry, and (iii) generally advance our understanding of early vision. Here we use monoptic sine-wave gratings and cross-orientation masking (XOM) to reveal two cross-oriented suppressive pathways in humans, both of which occur before full binocular summation of signals. One is a within-eye (ipsiocular) pathway that is spatially broadband, immune to contrast adaptation and has a suppressive weight that tends to decrease with stimulus duration. The other pathway operates between the eyes (interocular), is spatially tuned, desensitizes with contrast adaptation and has a suppressive weight that increases with stimulus duration. When cross-oriented masks are presented to both eyes, masking is enhanced or diminished for conditions in which either ipsiocular or interocular pathways dominate masking, respectively. We propose that ipsiocular suppression precedes the influence of interocular suppression and tentatively associate the two effects with the lateral geniculate nucleus (or retina) and the visual cortex respectively. The interocular route is a good candidate for the initial pathway involved in binocular rivalry and predicts that interocular cross-orientation suppression should be found in cortical cells with predominantly ipsiocular drive

User production and law reform: a socio-legal critique of user creativity

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. This article argues that recent scholarly attempts to prescribe creative agency to a user subject rarely consider how the user functions in a broader legal and cultural context. I suggest that the user is a complex subject defined by various cultural and legal discourses, following a critical body of scholarship that calls for a more nuanced approach to the issue of user production. I show how the user-a term often treated neutrally in the user production literature-is a subject that is already defined by extant legal discourses like copyright. This argument is developed in a detailed analysis of Canadian copyright law and the Copyright Modernization Act, a reform to Canadian copyright law, which attempted to address the phenomenon of user production. These examples show the user is embroiled in a broader set of creative politics where being defined as a user or an author can have commercial implications. I suggest greater specificity and qualification around the role and scope of the user is needed in future scholarship examining the phenomenon of user production

Price Theory, Competition, and the Rule of Reason

Challenging traditional antitrust jurisprudence, Professor Alan J. Meese argues that the present structure of Rule of Reason analysis, applied pursuant to Standard Oil v. United States, has become outdated. The Rule of Reason as currently applied by the courts rests upon neoclassical price theory, an economic paradigm that assumes that legitimate competition consists of unbridled technological rivalry, unconstrained by nonstandard contracts. Recently, however, the Supreme Court has begun to apply a competing paradigm- Transaction Cost Economics-when determining whether a contract is unreasonable per se or instead deserving of Rule of Reason scrutiny. Professor Meese argues that Transaction Cost Economics more accurately reflects market realities with the result that courts should also apply the teachings of this new paradigm when conducting Rule of Reason analysis. Accordingly, Professor Meese concludes that courts should abandon the current three-part Rule of Reason inquiry in those cases where nonstandard contracts avoid per se treatment because they plausibly produce nontechnological efficiencies by overcoming a market failure. In such cases, proof that a contract results in prices or other terms of trade different from those that preexist a restraint should not suffice to establish a prima facie case. Further, proof that contractual integration combats a market failure should, in any event, rebut a prima facie case, eliminating the need for courts to balance anticompetitive harms against procompetitive benefits. Finally, because the less restrictive alternative element of Rule of Reason analysis rests upon an assumption that any benefits of a nonstandard contract coexist with procompetitive effects, courts should abandon this element when analyzing restraints that purportedly combat market failure

Reframing the (False?) Choice Between Purchaser Welfare and Total Welfare

This Article critiques the role that the partial equilibrium trade-off paradigm plays in the debate over the definition of “consumer welfare” that courts should employ when developing and applying antitrust doctrine. The Article contends that common reliance on the paradigm distorts the debate between those who would equate “consumer welfare” with “total welfare” and those who equate consumer welfare with “purchaser welfare.” In particular, the model excludes, by fiat, the fact that new efficiencies free up resources that flow to other markets, increasing output and thus the welfare of purchasers in those markets. Moreover, the model also assumes that both the positive and negative impacts of a transaction are permanent and occur immediately and simultaneously. As a result, the model excludes the (very real) possibility that subsequent entry will undermine or mitigate any market power, leaving only efficiencies that benefit purchasers in the original market. Removal of these unrealistic assumptions requires the antitrust community to reframe the debate about the appropriate welfare standard for antitrust and could require adjustment of the standards applied to practices that both raise prices and create efficiencies in the relevant market. For instance, recognition that efficiencies generated in one market cause resource flows to other markets and higher output in such markets undermines claims that producers “pocket” efficiencies whenever a practice results in higher prices. Thus, instead of involving a conflict between “producers” and “purchasers” in a single market, transactions that both raise prices and create efficiencies require antitrust policy to resolve a conflict between purchasers in the original market, on the one hand, and those in other markets, on the other. In the same way, the realization that the trade-off model ignores the passage of time requires antitrust policy to resolve a conflict between current and future purchasers in the original market

Are Exchange Rates Excessively Variable?

"Unnecessary variation" is defined as variation not attributable to variation in fundamentals. In the absence of a good model of macroeconomic fundamentals, the question "are exchange rates excessively variable?" cannot be answered by comparing the variance of the actual exchange rate to the variance of a set of fundamentals. This paper notes the failure of regression equations to explain exchange rate movements even using contemporaneous macroeconomic variables. It notes as well the statistical rejections of the unbiasedness of the forward exchange rate as a predictor of the spot rate. It then argues that, given these results, there is not much to be learned from the variance-bounds tests and bubbles tests. The paper also discusses recent results on variation in the exchange risk premiums arising from variation in conditional variances, both as a source of the bias in the forward rate tests and as a source of variation in the spot rate. It finishes with a discussion of whether speculators' expectations are stabilizing or destabilizing, as measured by survey data. The paper concludes that it is possible that exchange rates have been excessively variable -- as, for example, when there are speculative bubbles -- but that if policy-makers try systematically to exploit their credibility in order to stabilize exchange rates, they may see their current credibility vanish.