US Antitrust

CRA provides economic advice and testimony in large, high stakes antitrust class action cases. Our experience includes analysis of class certification issues, liability, aggregate and individual class damages, injunctive relief, and settlement distribution issues. CRA uses its economic expertise and broad class action experience to help clients address these issues. In addition, we use our background in economic theory, econometrics, game theory modeling, and damages to analyze other economic issues, such as market definition, market power, and anticompetitive effects at a class-wide level.

Our economists leverage strong analytical skills and deep experience in multiple industries to provide expert damages analysis. CRA has assessed damages in thousands of disputes, including civil litigations, arbitrations, administrative proceedings, and international arbitrations. Complex damages claims require a reconstruction of the market as it would have evolved absent the alleged wrong in order to establish an accurate context in which to project the likely “but for” results of the subject business. Rigorous economic analysis of the relevant market is essential, and demonstration of causation is required.

Clear cut analysis of the issues arising in horizontal and vertical mergers and acquisitions is a CRA specialty. We have conducted reviews of mergers in most major industries and assisted clients in M&A transactions throughout the world. CRA employs highly advanced econometric tools—many developed by our own professionals—to speak the language government regulatory agencies themselves use and understand. Our experts define relevant product and geographic markets, measure market concentration, evaluate conditions of entry and efficiencies, and assess the competitive impact of proposed transactions.

Our experts use economic and technical expertise to help clients determine when competing aggressively crosses over into monopolization. When do exclusive contracts, loyalty rebates, and low pricing become anti-competitive? The distinction between pro- and anti-competitive behavior is very fine. Identical pricing and contractual practices may be acceptable when a firm’s market share is low but prohibited when its share is high. CRA brings clear thinking and cogent analysis to understanding these complex questions.

CRA experts have brought clarity to monopsony issues across a variety of industries and provided economic advice and testimony for many alleged monopsony matters. Our economic experts define product and geographic markets for the inputs or the services at issue and the output markets in which the inputs are used, as well as consider the role of differentiated products in those markets and the likelihood of entry by competing purchasers for those inputs/services.

Our experts excel in providing new insights into the economics of monopsony through cutting-edge analytics and innovative perspectives. For example, CRA experts have applied bargaining theory between buyers and sellers as an alternative to a more traditional monopsony model – yielding new information about the likely competitive impact of a buyer’s behavior.

The economic analysis of price discrimination requires careful and thorough analysis of the data to ensure, among other things, that the transactions being evaluated are comparable and that the prices to the buyers have been adjusted, as appropriate, for all discounts, including deferred allowances, rebates, and other payments to the buyers.

In our work, we evaluate:

• Whether a seller has charged higher prices for the same products and during the same period to one purchaser than to a second purchaser
• The timeframe the buyers competed in reselling the products or employed the products as inputs into the production of competing downstream goods
• The magnitudes and durations of the price differences
• Whether the price differences were justified by cost differences or efforts by the seller to meet competitors’ prices
• The effects of the price differences on the competitive relationship between buyers and on the competitive process more generally

Collusion, actual or alleged, is difficult to prove. CRA uses rigorous, objective economic analysis to assess the plausibility of collusion claims and distinguish between competitive and anti-competitive pricing and payment.

Liability: our economic experts assess the credibility of price-fixing claims and alleged facilitating devices used by firms to reinforce coordinated conduct. We also evaluate the scope of alleged conspiracies, identifying affected product lines, damaged customers, and relevant time periods.

Damages: calculation of damages is a core CRA strength and litigation support service. We estimate damages, critique opposing estimates, and provide pretrial evaluations of damage claims and methodologies in antitrust and intellectual property cases, contract disputes, and litigation involving property values and damages to natural resources.

Vertical restraints can encourage competition or harm it. CRA helps clients clarify the impact of vertical restraints (e.g., contractual restrictions that govern buyer pricing, exclusivity, and territories) by rigorously applying modern economic principles of contracting and appropriate statistical and econometric tools.

CRA’s economists have pioneered the development of many of the key elements of contractual economics. We are skilled in the use of the requisite empirical tools and procedures used to evaluate the competitive effects from vertical restraints: contract simulation, critical elasticity studies, cost-justification assessments and market surveys, among others. We have analyzed many vertical restraints issues, including reasonableness of territorial and customer restrictions, competitive effects of termination and renewal provisions, appropriateness of discounts, allowances and other promotional practices, and efficiency of after-market restrictions.