Working Paper No. 16-02: Abuse of Superior Bargaining Position (ASBP): What Can We Learn from Our Trading Partners?

Neither U.S. antitrust nor other domestic law seems to  provide a realistic remedy for a firm’s abuse of its superior bargaining position (ASBP) vis a vis another, positionally weaker firm, in the absence of recognized market power. Several of our major trading partners do have such a provision in their competition laws and there is enough to be learned from their experience and from investigations by academics and international institutions to warrant a careful examination of this gap in the regulation of vertical relationships to determine how such a provision could be made to work within a distinctively American framework.

This paper by AAI Founder and Senior Fellow Bert Foer advocates a process for the FTC to undertake, beginning with empirical data collection.