Invitational Symposium on Systems Competition

AAI’s interest in systems competition issues recognizes the expanding body of legal, economic, management/marketing, sociological, and engineering experience with rivalry within and between systems. Systems comprise simple complementary market relationships (or sets of interrelated markets), linked by interfaces, in a variety of industries. These include key infrastructure sectors such as airlines, telecommunications and agriculture, media, and high-technology areas where intellectual property is particularly important. The growing ubiquity of systems has important implications for competition since rivalry and its benefits are arguably harder to achieve when any single or few systems account for a significant proportion of consumer products or services produced. At the same time, the complexity of systems results in increased challenges for analyzing systems competition issues applying extant understanding of antitrust and competition policy.

As systems become more prevalent and strategic competition plays a more prominent role in their development and maintenance, antitrust will increasingly have to address systems-related issues in merger, monopolization, and even collusion cases. The goal of the conference is to build on existing economic and legal analysis of systems and add other disciplinary perspectives to offer insight into how antitrust enforcement should address the related competitive issues that are arising with increasing frequency in antitrust cases. It is clear that both the FTC and DOJ are already looking at things through a rudimentary systems lens, as we have seen in several cases, including U.S. vs. Northwest Airlines, United Airlines/ US Airways, and Monsanto/Delta and PineLand (D&PL).

Moreover, systems raise economic and legal issues that are central to AAI’s mission. AAI has already dealt extensively with systems-related issues in various cases, including: Monsanto/D&PL, Delta/Northwest, our analysis of Google/Microsoft/Yahoo, and our investigation into automobile aftermarkets. Systems analysis has been informed by two AAI workshops held at Northeastern University in 2006 and 2008. The AAI’s two conferences on monopolization in 2007 focused on emerging issues that may influence our thinking about systems competition. Other projects that have helped inform our approach to systems are the AAI aftermarkets symposium (Antitrust Bulletin (2007)), the AAI symposium on complexity published in the Antitrust Bulletin (2006), and our Network Access Project and resulting book: Network Access, Regulation and Antitrust (published in 2005 by Routlege).

We invite discussion and comments on the following questions that would form the basis of the topics covered in a one-day program. A number of experts—many of which have attended prior workshops—are interested in developing papers for an AAI conference and the Antitrust Bulletin has expressed interest in publishing them in a symposium issue.