IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cwl/cwldpp/1617.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

United States Courts and the Optimal Deterrence of International Cartels: A Welfarist Perspective on Empagran

Author

Listed:

Abstract

E. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. v. Empagran S.A. concerned a private antitrust suit for damages against a global vitamins cartel. The central issue in the litigation was whether foreign plaintiffs injured by the cartel’s conduct abroad could bring suit in U.S. court, an issue that was ultimately resolved in the negative. We take a welfarist perspective on this issue and inquire whether optimal deterrence requires U.S. courts to take subject matter jurisdiction under U.S. law for claims such as those in Empagran. Our analysis considers, in particular, the arguments of various economist amici in favor of jurisdiction and arguments of the U.S. and foreign government amici against jurisdiction. We explain why the issue is difficult to resolve, and identify several economic concerns, which the amici did not address, that may counsel against jurisdiction. We also analyze the legal standard enunciated by the Supreme Court and applied on remand by the DC Circuit, and we argue that its focus on "independent" harms and "proximate" causation is problematic and does not provide an adequate economic foundation for resolving the underlying legal issues. A revised version of this paper is forthcoming in ANTITRUST STORIES from Foundation Press, edited by Daniel Crane and Eleanor Fox.

Suggested Citation

  • Alvin K. Klevorick & Alan O. Sykes, 2007. "United States Courts and the Optimal Deterrence of International Cartels: A Welfarist Perspective on Empagran," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1617, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
  • Handle: RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:1617
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d16/d1617.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Horn, Henrik & Mavroidis, Petros C., 2008. "The Permissible Reach of National Environmental Policies," Working Paper Series 739, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, revised 20 Jun 2008.
    2. McCalman, Phillip, 2023. "Robust trade policy to offset foreign market power," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Antitrust; Cartels; Competition policy; International trade;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:cwl:cwldpp:1617. 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: Brittany Ladd (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cowleus.html .

    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.