Feb 02, · Jeff Bezos's net worth hit $ billion after Amazon posted 38% revenue growth and $ billion in profit. His ability to make bets that add to its top line growth make Amazon the world's best II. CASE STUDY OF AMAZON Emerging as an American multinational E commerce co, Amazon has turned out to be leading online retailer co and offering cloud computing services. Two technologies driving the growth of Amazon has been the integration of Customer relationship management and Information management to the overall business strategy Oct 04, · Amazon is changing the US economy more than any other company - CNN. It's Amazon's world. We just live in it. Story by Lydia DePillis, CNN Business. Video by Jon Sarlin, CNN Business. Updated
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Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space.
Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive.
These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded.
Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, amazon the next american essay, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend.
This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors. I am deeply grateful to David Singh Grewal for encouraging me to pursue this project and to Barry C.
Lynn for introducing me to these issues amazon the next american essay the first place. For thoughtful feedback at various stages of this project, I am also grateful to Christopher R. Leslie, Daniel Markovitsamazon the next american essay, Stacy Mitchell, Frank Pasquale, George Priest, Maurice Stuckeand Sandeep Vaheesan. Lastly, many thanks to Juliana BrintUrja Mittal, amazon the next american essay, and the Yale Law Journal staff for insightful comments and careful editing.
All errors are my own. Customers celebrated and the competition languished, amazon the next american essay. Nevertheless, a segment of shareholders believed that by dumping money into advertising and steep discounts, Amazon was making a sound investment that would yield returns once e-commerce took off.
Each quarter the company would report losses, and its stock price would rise. Sixteen years on, nobody seriously doubts that Amazon is anything but the titan of twenty-firstcentury commerce. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth—reporting double-digit increases in net sales yearly—it reports meager profits, choosing to invest aggressively instead. Yet investors. amazon the next american essay into the stock.
Due to a change in legal thinking and practice in the s and s, antitrust law now assesses competition largely with an eye to the short-term interests of consumers, not producers or the health of the market as a whole; antitrust doctrine views low consumer prices, alone, to be evidence of sound competition.
By this measure, Amazon has excelled; it has evaded government scrutiny in part through fervently devoting its business strategy and rhetoric to reducing prices for consumers. With its missionary zeal for consumers, Amazon has marched toward monopoly by singing the tune of contemporary antitrust.
Focusing on these metrics instead blinds us to the potential hazards, amazon the next american essay. My argument is that gauging real competition in amazon the next american essay twenty-first century marketplace—especially in the case of online platforms—requires analyzing the underlying structure and dynamics of markets.
Rather than pegging competition to a narrow set of outcomes, this approach would examine the competitive process itself. This is the approach I adopt in this Note. Part I gives an overview of the shift in antitrust away from economic structuralism in favor of price theory and identifies how this departure has played out in two areas of enforcement: predatory pricing and vertical integration.
Part II questions this narrow focus on consumer welfare as largely measured by prices, arguing that assessing structure is vital to protect important antitrust values. The Note then assesses how antitrust law can address the challenges raised by online platforms like Amazon. Part V considers what capital markets suggest about the economics of Amazon and other internet platforms. Part Amazon the next american essay offers two approaches for addressing the power of dominant platforms: 1 limiting their dominance through restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles and 2 regulating their dominance by applying common carrier obligations and duties.
One of the most significant changes in antitrust law and interpretation over the last century has been the move away from economic structuralism. In this Part, I trace this history by sketching out how a structure-based view of competition has been amazon the next american essay by price theory and exploring how this shift has played out through changes in doctrine and enforcement.
Broadly, economic structuralism rests on the idea that concentrated market structures promote anticompetitive forms of conduct.
This is because: 1 monopolistic and oligopolistic market structures enable dominant actors to coordinate with greater ease and subtlety, facilitating conduct like price-fixing, market division, and tacit collusion; 2 monopolistic and oligopolistic firms can use their existing dominance to block new entrants; and 3 monopolistic and oligopolistic firms have greater bargaining power against consumers, suppliers, and workers, which enables them to hike prices and degrade service and quality while maintaining profits.
This market structure-based understanding of competition was a foundation of antitrust thought and policy through the s. Subscribing to this view, courts blocked mergers that they determined would lead to anticompetitive market structures.
In some instances, this meant halting horizontal deals—mergers combining two direct competitors operating in the same market or product line—that would have handed the new entity a large share of the market. The Chicago School approach to antitrust, which gained mainstream prominence and credibility in the s and s, rejected this structuralist view.
A failure to act in this fashion will be punished by the competitive forces of the market, amazon the next american essay. While economic structuralists believe that industrial structure predisposes firms toward certain forms of behavior that then steer market outcomes, the Chicago School presumes that market outcomes—including firm size, amazon the next american essay, industry structure, and concentration levels—reflect the interplay of standalone market forces and the technical demands of production.
Practically, the shift from structuralism to price theory had two major ramifications for antitrust analysis. First, it led to a significant narrowing of the concept of entry barriers. An entry barrier is a cost that must be borne by a firm seeking to enter an industry but is not carried by firms already in the industry. discounted, all firms are subject to the threat of potential competition. regardless of the number of firms or levels of concentration. The second consequence of the shift away from structuralism was that consumer prices became the dominant metric for assessing competition.
In his highly influential work, The Antitrust ParadoxRobert Bork asserted that the sole normative objective of antitrust should be to maximize consumer welfare, best pursued through promoting economic efficiency.
The merger guidelines issued by the Reagan Administration—a radical departure from the previous guidelines, written in —reflected this newfound focus. It is true that antitrust authorities do not ignore non-price effects entirely.
The Horizontal Merger Guidelines, for example, acknowledge that enhanced market power can manifest as non-price harms, including in the form of reduced product quality, reduced product variety, reduced service, or diminished innovation. Two areas of enforcement that this reorientation has affected dramatically are predatory pricing and vertical integration. Through the mid-twentieth century, Congress repeatedly enacted legislation targeting predatory pricing.
Congress, as well as state legislatures, viewed predatory pricing as a tactic used by highly amazon the next american essay firms to bankrupt rivals and destroy competition—in other words, as a tool to concentrate control. Laws prohibiting predatory pricing were part of a larger arrangement of pricing laws that sought to distribute power and opportunity. However, amazon the next american essay controversial Supreme Court decision in amazon the next american essay s created an opening for critics to attack the regime.
In its antitrust case against the company, the government argued that a suite of practices by Standard Oil—including predatory pricing—violated section 2 of the Sherman Act. The Supreme Court ruled for the government and ordered the break-up of the company. Recognizing the threat of predatory pricing executed by Standard Oil, amazon the next american essay, Congress passed a series of laws prohibiting such conduct.
In Congress enacted the Clayton Act 55 to strengthen the Sherman Act and included a provision to curb price discrimination and predatory pricing, amazon the next american essay. Fair trade legislation granted producers the right to set the final retail price of their goods, limiting the ability of chain stores to discount.
After the Supreme Court in struck down the form of resale price maintenance enabled by fair trade laws, 59 Congress in carved out an exception for state fair trade laws through the Miller- Tydings Act. This Act prohibited price discrimination by retailers among producers and by producers among retailers. This series of antitrust laws demonstrates that Congress saw predatory pricing as a serious threat to competitive markets. By the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court recognized and gave effect to this congressional intent.
The Court upheld the Robinson- Patman Act numerous times, holding that the relevant factors were whether a retailer intended to destroy competition through its pricing practices and whether its conduct furthered that purpose. Liquidating excess or perishable goods, for example, was considered fair game. In Utah Pie Co. Continental Baking Co.
A locational advantage gave Utah Pie cheaper access to the Salt Lake City market, which it used to price goods below those sold by competitors. Other frozen pie manufacturers, including Continental, amazon the next american essay, began selling at below-cost prices in the Salt Lake City market, while keeping prices in other regions at or above cost. Utah Pie brought a predatory pricing case against Continental.
The decision was amazon the next american essay. Prior to the alleged predation, Utah Pie had controlled The case presented an opportunity for critics of predatory pricing laws to attack the doctrine as misguided. This, as more recent economic literature confirms, is at best a highly dubious presumption, amazon the next american essay. Defendants were convicted not of injuring competition but, quite simply, of competing. As the writings of Bowman and Bork suggest, the Chicago School critique of predatory pricing doctrine rests on the idea that below-cost pricing is irrational and hence rarely occurs, amazon the next american essay.
Second, even if a competitor were to drop out, the predator would need to sustain monopoly pricing for long enough to recoup the initial losses and successfully thwart entry by potential competitors, who would be lured by the monopoly pricing. The uncertainty of its success, coupled with its guarantee of costs, made predatory pricing an unappealing—and therefore highly unlikely—strategy.
As the influence and credibility of these scholars grew, their thinking shaped government enforcement. During the s, for example, amazon the next american essay, the number of Robinson- Patman Act cases that the FTC brought dropped dramatically, reflecting the belief that these cases were of little economic concern.
The Chicago School critique came to shape Supreme Court doctrine on predatory pricing. The depth and degree of this influence became apparent in Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Zenith Radio Corp. market in order to drive American companies out of business.
Thus mistaken inferences in cases such as this one are especially costly, because they chill the very conduct the antitrust laws are designed to protect. Although Matsushita focused on a narrow issue—the summary judgment standard for claims brought under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which targets coordinationamong parties 94 —it has been widely influential in monopolization cases, which fall under Section 2. In other words, reasoning that originated in one context has wound up in jurisprudence applying to totally distinct circumstances, even as the underlying violations differ vastly, amazon the next american essay.
In Brooke Group Ltd. The case involved cigarette manufacturing, an industry dominated by six firms. In placing recoupment at the center of predatory pricing analysis, the Court presumed that direct profit maximization is the singular goal of predatory pricing.
Today, succeeding on a predatory pricing claim requires a plaintiff to meet the Brooke Amazon the next american essay recoupment test by showing that the defendant would be able to recoup its losses through sustaining supracompetitive prices.
Since the Court introduced this recoupment requirement, the number of cases brought and won by plaintiffs has dropped dramatically. Analysis of vertical integration has similarly moved away from structural concerns.
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, time: 16:31Amazon is changing the US economy more than any other company - CNN
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