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The market developments in international air transportation have led to the dominance of three global airline alliances - Star, SkyTeam and oneworld. At the same time, members of these alliances receive increasingly more freedom in coordinating various aspects of joint operations, including scheduling and pricing decisions, as well as the right to form revenue-sharing joint ventures in international markets. Although the significant consumer benefits generated by airline cooperation are undisputed, the recent developments raise antitrust concerns. Against this background, the paper compares the key competitive effects of airline alliances and antitrust immunity with the economic lines of reasoning in recent policy actions to develop recommendations for a full-fledged assessment of antitrust immunity for airline alliances.

This paper offers the first formal economic analysis of carve-outs under airline antitrust im- munity. Carve-outs are designed to limit the potential anticompetitive effects of cooperation by alliance partners in hub-to-hub markets, where they provide overlapping nonstop service. While the paper shows that carve-outs are beneficial when the alliance does not involve full integration of the partners' operations on the hub-to-hub route, its key point is that a carve-out may be harmful when imposed on a joint-venture alliance. A JV alliance involves full exploitation of economies of traffic density on the hub-to-hub route, and a carve-out prevents the realization of these benefits. While a carve-out may limit anticompetitive incentives on the hub-to-hub route, welfare may be reduced if the resulting gains are overshadowed by the efficiency loss generated by the carve-out.

Pt. 1: Mr. Dingell, from the Committee on Energy and Commerce, submitted the following report together with additional views to accompany H.R. 3626 including cost estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, 103rd Congress, 2nd Session, June 24, 1994. - 85 S. - (REPT. 103-559 Pt. 1); Pt. 2: Mr. Brooks, from the Committee on Judiciary, submitted the following report to accompany H.R. 3626 including cost estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, 103rd Congress, 2nd Session, June 24, 1994. - 145 S. - (REPT. 103-559 Pt. 2)

18 pages ; The U.S. Congress regulated the railroad industry in 1887, and over the course of the 20th century also granted the industry significant antitrust immunities. Antitrust immunities are laws that expressly exempt an industry from prosecution under antitrust laws, such as the Sherman Act. Presumably, the rationale for railroad antitrust immunities was that because railroads were stringently regulated, the regulators alone would uphold antitrust principles and make antitrust litigation unnecessary. However, culminating in the passage of the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, the railroad industry was largely deregulated, yet retained many antitrust immunities. This has raised concerns among shippers and consumers that railroad companies, which often face neither regulation nor antitrust liability, can freely commit anticompetitive abuses. Given these concerns and currently proposed legislation to abolish railroad antitrust immunities, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficacy of legal outcomes in a counterfactual situation where antitrust immunities are abolished. To reach this end, I will first clarify railroad regulation and deregulation, antitrust laws as they apply to all other industries, and the poorly understood railroad antitrust immunities. ; University of Oregon College Scholars Rippey Fellowship

This January, the U.S. Memories consortium dissolved when it failed to attract a sufficient initial investment. U.S. Memories would have brought together America's largest computer and semiconductor manufacturers, at a start-up cost of approximately $1 billion, to manufacture 4-megabit dynamic random access memory (DRAM) semiconductor chips with IBM-licensed technology. Some commentators argue that antitrust concerns led to U.S. Memories' demise and could frustrate the rise of additional joint production ventures (JPV s). Should the government intervene and relax the antitrust laws to support JPV s? That was the question posed in hearings before a congressional subcommittee in 1989 on four antitrust reform bills.

This thesis is a collection of essays about the instrumental use of commitment decisions to facilitate the completion of the European internal electricity market. European policy can shape markets in many ways, two most evident being regulation and competition enforcement. The interplay between these two instruments attracts a lot of scholarly attention. One of the major concerns in the competition vs. regulation debate is the instrumental use of competition rules. It has been observed that competition enforcement is triggered not only as a response to an anticompetitive harm occurring in the market, but that it sometimes becomes a powerful tool in the European Commission's hands to pursue regulatory goals. This thesis looks for examples of such instrumentalisation in the context of electricity markets and finds that the Commission is very pragmatic in using all the possible instruments it has at hand to push forward its project of creating the internal electricity market. This includes regulation, competition enforcement and all sorts of political pressure. To the extent that commitment decisions accelerate sector-specific regulation and overcome political deadlocks, they contribute to the Commission's energy policy goals. However, instrumentalisation of competition rules comes at a certain cost to competition policy, energy policy and, most importantly, to electricity markets themselves. Markets might be negatively affected either indirectly, by application of sector-specific regulation or competition policy building on previous commitment decisions, or directly, through the implementation of inadequate commitments in individual cases. Concluding, commitment decisions generally contributed to achieving the policy objectives of the internal electricity market, but their use for that purpose does not come without cost. Given that this cost is ultimately borne by the internal electricity market, the Commission should take a more balanced approach to the instrumental use of commitment decisions so that it does not do more harm than good.

Many economists and antitrust experts claim that ocean shipping conferences are essentially legalized cartels. They often advocate eliminating ocean shipping conferences' antitrust immunity. This paper argues that conferences also help to coordinate their members' joint investments and thereby allow the historically small firms in this industry to exploit vast network economies (akin to those in other transportation industries) that small firms could not capture on their own. The paper proposes reducing rather than eliminating immunity and calls for an end to many of the regulations currently stifling the industry.

Presents a socialist perspective on the 1980s disbanding of communism in the USSR & Eastern Europe. It is asserted that a capitalist economic system was imposed by the liberal governments of Eastern Europe, their representative bodies were dissolved, fundamental rights & securities curtailed, & protesters repressed. Discrimination was practiced against those who did not support the new measures & against certain minority groups. Also, as a result of market liberalization, there was a dramatic increase in unemployment, poverty, income inequality, & overall human suffering. It is concluded that the West's positive portrayal of the collapse of socialism ignores the massive upheavals, oppression, inequality, & suffering that the transition to capitalism has caused in the former communist bloc. M. Nichols-Wagner

This book, the first unbiased investigation of the effects of extraterritorial antitrust on U.S. business abroad, examines the influence of the Sherman Antitrust Act on the market-entry strategy of U.S. multinational corporations and assesses the interaction of public interest and the law.