Robert Bork and Transaction Cost Economics

Lawyer and Scientist

Economic science and antitrust doctrine go hand in hand.  Over a century ago, in Standard Oil v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911), the Supreme Court famously announced that the Sherman Act bans only those agreements and other conduct that results in monopoly or the consequences of monopoly. The Court identified three (and only three) such consequences: (1) output below the competitive level; (2) prices above the competitive level; and (3) quality below the competitive level. Thus, as Justice Stevens explained for the Court in National Society of Professional Engineers v. United States, 435 U.S. 679 (1978), Standard Oil is based upon "economic conceptions," and courts applying  the decision's "Rule of Reason" must focus solely on a challenged restraint's impact upon "competitive conditions."  It is thus no surprise that advances in economic science have influenced the content of antitrust doctrine over the past century or more.  As Herbert Hovenkamp put it over two decades ago:

"One of the great myths about American antitrust policy is that courts began to adopt an 'economic approach' to antitrust problems only in the 1970s.  At most this 'revolution' in antitrust policy represented a change in economic models.  Antitrust policy has been forged by economic ideology from its inception."

See Herbert Hovenkamp, Enterprise and American Law, 268 (1991).

Of course, judges are not economists, and they lack the leisure time and expertise necessary to keep abreast of the latest developments in economic science.  At the same time, economists are generally not lawyers, with the result that many will have difficulty "translating" developments in economic science into appropriate proposed changes in antitrust doctrine.  For decades, then, economically sophisticated legal scholars have played the role of translators, bridging the divide between economists and economic science, on the one hand, and generalist judges, on the other.   Successful translators have included Robert Bork, Philip Areeda, Donald Turner, Frank Easterbrook, Herbert Hovenkamp, and Richard Posner.  

This account of the relationship between economic science and antitrust doctrine treats economic science as exogenous and legal scholars and judges as passive recipients of developments in economics.  Indeed, some legal scholars have described their contributions in exactly this way.  For instance, Robert Bork claimed that his work simply assessed and critiqued antitrust doctrine in light of what he called "conventional price theory" and "basic price theory."  See e.g. Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox, 117 (1978) (invoking "conventional price theory"); Robert H. Bork, Resale Price Maintenance and Consumer Welfare, 77 Yale L. J. 950, 952 (1968) (invoking "basic price theory").   Richard Posner also claimed that the Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis was simply a manifestation of rigorous application of "price theory" to antitrust problem, an approach that Posner characterized as "novel."  See Richard A. Posner, The Chicago School of Antitrust Analysis, 127 U. Penn. L. Rev. 925 (1979).  By characterizing their contributions as mere applications of scientific principles determined elsewhere, these and other scholars could enhance the authority and persuasiveness of their proposals.

The assumption that economic science is exogenous to the legal academy is roughly true. There is, however, one counter-example suggesting that this assumption is not entirely accurate, namely, Robert Bork's contributions to the body of economic theory known as Transaction Cost Economics.  Contrary to his modest claim that he merely applied basic price theory to antitrust problems, Bork also made original contributions to economic science.  Ironically, these contributions actually undermined certain facets of price theory, particularly price theory's account of non-standard contracts. As previously explained on this blog, basic price theory identified two and only two rationales for complete or partial vertical integration: (1) the realization of technological efficiencies or (2) the acquisition or extension of market power.  By their nature, technological efficiencies arise "within" individual firms, during production and before sale.  However, non-standard contracts (minimum rpm, exclusive territories and the like) necessarily reach beyond the boundaries of the manufacturer to control the behavior of other firms, particularly wholesalers and retailers.  As a result, price theorists naturally assumed that such agreements cannot produce efficiencies and thus inferred that they were instead efforts to acquire or preserve market power.  The result was the so-called "inhospitality tradition" of antitrust, which was particularly hostile to various forms of partial contractual integration.

Of course, even before World War II, Ronald Coase undermined price theory's account of vertical integration, demonstrating that such integration could reduce transaction costs, regardless of any technological efficiencies.  See R.H. Coase, The Nature of the Firm, 4 Economica (n.s.) 381 (1937). However, this contribution went unnoticed at the time, exhibiting no influence on economic theory itself, let alone antitrust doctrine.  Indeed, according to conventional wisdom (including the work of Coase himself), no one understood or applied Coase's insight until various economists, particularly Oliver Williamson, rediscovered and expanded upon Coase's insight, particularly by expanding the definition of transaction costs to include the risk of opportunism that can arise due to relationship specific investments.

There is no doubt that Williamson played the preeminent role in bringing attention to Coase's insight and developing the transaction cost paradigm of industrial organization.  For this work he properly earned the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.   At the same time, this essay, prepared for a conference at Yale Law School and recently published by this blogger, contends that Robert Bork, although not an economist, played a hitherto unappreciated role in rediscovering Coase's transaction cost explanation for vertical integration.

As the essay shows, in a 1966 article, Bork critiqued the conventional wisdom regarding certain forms of contractual integration, particularly: (1) vertical contractual integration between a manufacturer and its dealers and (2) horizontal contractual integration between partners in an otherwise valid joint venture.  See Robert H. Bork, The Rule of Reason and the Per Se Concept: Price Fixing and Market Division II, 75 Yale L. J. 373 (1966).  (For more on Bork's revolutionary contributions to antitrust thought, go here.)  This critique cited Coase's 1937 work for the proposition that "contractual" integration and "ownership" integration can be alternative means of achieving the same economic objectives, an assertion at odds with price theory's technological conception of the firm.  (By contrast, Lester Telser's transaction cost interpretation of minimum resale price maintenance, on which Bork also drew, did not mention Coase.) Moreover, Bork also employed transaction cost reasoning to explain how exclusive territories (both vertical and horizontal), customer restrictions and ancillary horizontal minimum price fixing could overcome various costs of relying upon unfettered atomistic markets to conduct economic activity.  In so doing, he expressly assumed the existence of post-transaction opportunism, a condition unknown to price theory, albeit not in so many words.  That is, Bork assumed that a manufacturer's or joint venture's reliance upon an unfettered market to distribute goods could result in "parasitical" behavior by some distributors, behavior that would "take advantage" of and "victimize" fellow trading partners by "appropriating" to the parasite the contributions of others.  Parties would anticipate such opportunism, he said, and respond by adopting non-standard agreements that could prevent such behavior and, for instance, ensure an optimal quantity and type of promotional expenditure. 

Bork also explained how relegating manufacturers and joint ventures to the alternative of specifying the promotional obligations of distributors would entail prohibitive information and monitoring costs, costs that price theory simply assumed away, such as a manufacturer’s cost of ascertaining the appropriate type and amount of promotion for each dealer’s locality.  Thus, Bork conducted the sort of comparative analysis of alternative contractual mechanisms that today is a hallmark of transaction cost analysis.  Indeed, Bork even went so far as to characterize vertically-imposed exclusive territories as contractual property rights that aligned the interests of manufacturers and dealers, thereby departing from price theory's assumption of fixed property rights. (For additional elaboration on the "property rights" interpretation of intrabrand restraints, go here.)


In short, despite his repeated invocation of "price theory" as the only appropriate source of economic knowledge relevant to antitrust, Bork himself rejected various price-theoretic assumptions and developed tools of transaction cost economics to offer a novel interpretation of various non-standard agreements that price theory's "inhospitality tradition" had condemned.  Instead of functioning as a passive recipient of scientific change, Bork helped initiate such change himself.  Hopefully Bork's contributions to economic science will receive the notoriety they deserve.   

Robert Bork, Antitrust Revolutionary

Economic Subversive

This week brought the sad news that Robert Bork has died, at the age of 85.  Bork had a long and varied career.  (See here and here for remembrances.)  He served in the Marine Corp from 1945-46 and graduated from the College at the University of Chicago in 1948.  He then matriculated at the University of Chicago Law School, which he left to rejoin the Marines during the Korean War.  After Law School he served as a fellow in Law and Economics for one year, practiced law at Kirkland and Ellis in Chicago and then joined the faculty at Yale Law School.  While at Yale, President Nixon nominated and appointed Bork to serve as Solicitor General of the United States in 1973, where Bork served until the end of the Ford Administration in January 1977.  President Reagan nominated Bork to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1981 and appointed him after Senate confirmation in 1982.   He retired from that court in 1988.  President Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, but the U.S. Senate ignominiously refused to confirm him.  This essay, by former Tenth Circuit Judge Michael McConnell, now Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, explains why the Senate's rejection of Judge Bork helped politicize the Court and diminish the Rule of Law.

Most of the punditry and analysis following Judge Bork's death has focused on his views on the Constitution, particularly his strong and articulate support for an "originalist" approach to constitutional interpretation.  These commentaries have ignored Bork's tremendous influence in another field, namely, Antitrust Law.  For instance, the main piece in the New York Times on Bork's passing, while over 2,000 words long, contains only a brief paragraph about his contributions to antitrust law.  CNN's story on the occasion of Bork's death does not mention Bork's contributions to antitrust law at all, aside from a brief quote of Justice Scalia, who lauds Bork's influence over the field.  Other essays have, like Judge McConnell's, focused on the implications of Bork's nomination and rejection for the confirmation process and the integrity of the courts.  (See here and here.)  These oversights are unfortunate.   Simply put, Bork helped revolutionize the way that scholars, judges and enforcement officials view the appropriate scope of antitrust regulation and thus the role of the federal government in the nation's economy.  More precisely, no individual scholar had a greater influence on antitrust law and policy than Robert Bork.

Many know Bork from his classic book, The Antitrust Paradox, published in 1978.  For instance, one remembrance states "The Antitrust Paradox, published in 1978, shifted the entire focus of antitrust policy toward consumer welfare," without mentioning any previous work.  (See also several similar statements by various participants in this National Review symposium.)   However, Bork's campaign to revolutionize Antitrust started more than a decade and a half before publication of the Antitrust Paradox.   In particular, while at Yale (ironically?) Bork laid the foundation for the so-called "Chicago Revolution" in antitrust law and policy with a series of articles published between 1961 and 1968.  The Antitrust Paradox drew upon these arguments.     In these works, Bork made two broad and fundamental contributions to antitrust analysis, one normative and one technocratic.

As a normative matter, Bork argued that the antitrust laws should have one goal and one goal alone, namely, the maximization of consumer welfare, which Bork equated with allocative efficiency and thus total economic welfare.  To be sure, other scholars embraced a "total welfare" approach before Bork did.  In particular, and as I explained in this article, Harvard-school economists Edward Mason, Donald Turner, and Carl Kaysen also embraced "total welfare" as an exclusive goal of antitrust regulation.  However, Bork's work differed from the work of these scholars in two ways.  First, Bork expressly linked "total welfare" and "efficiency" to "consumer welfare," whereas the Harvard School had not employed the latter term, choosing instead to focus only on "efficiency" as the appropriate goal.  Second, unlike these Harvard scholars, Bork offered a legal defense of total welfare/consumer welfare as an antitrust goal.  In particular, after a thorough review of the legislative history of the Sherman Act, Bork argued that the Congress that passed the Act only "intended" to ban those restraints that reduced total welfare, thus leaving those that enhanced efficient resource allocation unscathed.  See Robert H. Bork, Legislative Intent and the Policy of the Sherman Act, 9 J. L. & Econ. 7 (1966).  Bork also argued that, even if Congress's goal was unclear, courts should nonetheless pursue "consumer welfare" exclusively, because the pursuit of any other goal (e.g., a fair distribution of income) or combinations of goals (e.g. protection of small businesses and efficiency) would require courts to make value choices and trade-offs that were properly left to the legislature.  See  Robert Bork, The Goals of Antitrust Policy, 57 American Econ. Rev. (Papers and Proceedings) 242 (1967).  Some scholars have taken issue with Bork's equation of "consumer welfare" with total welfare, with one scholar referring to this claim as "something [Bork] made up." (See also here for an argument that Congress meant to ban all restraints that increased consumer prices in a relevant market, even if the practice increased total welfare.)    Correct or not, Bork's claim was highly influential.  Indeed, in Reiter v. Sonotone, 442 U.S. 330, 343 (1979) the Supreme Court announced that Congress intended the Sherman Act as a "consumer welfare prescription," citing the Antitrust Paradox for this proposition.

As a technocratic matter, Bork proposed the sort of radical reform in antitrust doctrine necessary to make "consumer welfare" as he defined it the exclusive priority of antitrust law.   Perhaps most famously, Bork rehabilitated the distinction, made famous by William Howard Taft, between "naked" and "ancillary" restraints.  See Addyston Pipe and Steel Co. v. United States, 85 F. 271 (6th Cir. 1898).  Like Taft, Bork argued that naked restraints should be unlawful per se, while ancillary restraints should be analyzed under a forgiving rule of reason.   Moreover, Bork also contended that early Sherman Act case law followed Taft's template, even though courts sometimes used different formulations when articulating antitrust doctrine.  In particular, Bork concluded that Taft's formulation anticipated the "Rule of Reason," articulated in Standard Oil v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911) (discussed here), which banned only those restraints that "unduly restrain trade" by producing "monopoly or its consequences."  See Robert H. Bork, The Rule of Reason and the Per Se Concept: Price Fixing and Market Division, 74 Yale L. J. 775 (1965).  Moreover, employing the latest economic theory of the time (and theory that is still adequate for such purposes today), Bork explained why this distinction between "naked" and "ancillary" restraints would produce results that would maximize "consumer welfare" as he defined it.  See Robert H. Bork, The Rule of Reason and the Per Se Concept: Price Fixing and Market Division, part II, 75 Yale L. J. 373 (1966).   Thus, Bork explained that ancillary restraints could align the incentives of individual venture participants with the welfare of the overall venture and thus produce significant efficiencies and enhance the allocation of resources.  In so doing, he argued persuasively for the expansion for the category of restraints deemed "ancillary" to otherwise lawful objectives.  For instance, relying upon the work of Lester Telser, Bork explained how minimum resale price maintenance or exclusive territories imposed by manufacturers or joint ventures could ensure that dealers or venture partners made adequate investments in promotion, instead of "free riding" on the efforts of other dealers or partners. (Unlike Telser, who had focused only on vertical minimum rpm, Bork focused on horizontal and vertical price and non-price restraints.)   In so doing, Bork drew on the work of Ronald Coase, whose 1937 article on the Nature of the Firm would help Coase earn the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1991.  Thus, Bork was an early pioneer in applying transaction cost economics to antitrust problems.   (See here, at pp. 53-54 for an account of Bork's early invocation of Coase and transaction cost considerations).  During this same period, Richard Posner, a later convert to Chicago thinking, contended that non-price vertical restraints rarely produced benefits and should this be presumptively unlawful.

The Supreme Court endorsed Bork's reasoning in Continental T.V. v. GTE Sylvania, 433 U.S. 36 (1977), holding, contrary to previous precedent, that non-price vertical restraints could prevent "free riding" and thus may produce "redeeming virtues" of the sort that preclude per se condemnation.  Instead, the Sylvania Court said, courts should analyze such agreements under a forgiving rule of reason.  (Note that the Court issued Sylvania before publication of the Antitrust Paradox.)  Less than a decade later, the Court applied similar reasoning in the context of horizontal restraints, invoking Sylvania and subsequent work of Judge Bork for the proposition that horizontal agreements between members of  sports leagues could enhance the quality of the league's product, thereby preventing per se condemnation of such restraints.    See NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, 464 U.S. 85 (1984).  Shortly thereafter, the Court extended Sylvania, holding that an agreement between a manufacturer and a dealer to terminate another dealer for price cutting was not unlawful per se.  See Business Electronics v. Sharp Electronics, 485 U.S. 717 (1988).  Nearly a decade later, the Court unanimously reversed the per se ban on maximum resale price maintenance.  See State Oil v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997).  More recently, in Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S. 877 (2007), the Court overturned a 96 year old ban on minimum resale price maintenance, relying upon the work of Bork and others for the proposition that such agreements could combat free riding and thus facilitate promotion of a manufacturer's product.  Each of these decisions, from Sylvania through Leegin, cited Bork's academic work with approval.  To be sure, these decisions cited the work of other scholars as well, but at least some such work simply repeated what Bork had already said a decade or more earlier.

Bork's influence was not confined to the definition and treatment of ancillary restraints.  He also leveled powerful critiques at the Supreme Court's hapless and wealth-destroying merger doctrine, exemplified by cases such as Vons Grocery v. United States, 384 U.S. 270 (1964) and Brown Shoe Co. v. United States, 370 U.S. 294 (1962).  See Robert H. Bork, Anticompetitive Enforcement Doctrines Under Section 7 of the Clayton Act, 39 Tex. L. Rev. 832 (1961).    In both decisions the Supreme Court banned, as contrary to section 7 of the Clayton Act, mergers between firms with small shares in markets characterized by ease of entry.  (In Vons, for instance, the firm created by the challenged merger would have had 8 percent of a market with over 3,000 remaining firms.)  As Bork explained, such mergers could not create or facilitate the exercise of market power.  It was thus logical to infer that parties to such transactions hoped to achieve efficiencies. Bork also leveled powerful critiques against overly intrusive standards governing alleged predatory activity, particularly often-unfounded claims that refusals to deal or vertical integration disadvantaged rivals without creating offsetting efficiencies and thus injured consumers.  See Robert Bork and Ward Bowman, The Crisis in Antitrust, 65 Columbia L. Rev. 363 (1965); Robert H. Bork, Vertical Integration and the Sherman Act, 22 U. Chi. L. Rev. 157 (1954).  In 1986, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Stevens, invoked Bork's test for evaluating alleged predatory conduct.  See Aspen Highlands v. Aspen Highlands Ski Co., 472 U.S. 585, 597 n. 33 (1986)(citing the Antitrust Paradox for the proposition that conduct was only predatory if it excluded rivals on some basis other than efficiency).

Obviously Bork was not the only participant in the Chicago Antitrust Revolution.   Moreover, many outside the Chicago School endorsed Chicago School critiques of current doctrine and proposals for reform.  For instance, Bork's work led Harvard School icon Donald Turner to reverse his views on vertical restraints.  However, the record shows that Bork led the way and employed reason, not force, to convince others to follow.