The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and United States Department
of Justice (DOJ) hosted a workshop on June 23, 2014 discussing the
law and economics of "conditional pricing"
programs. Most panelists were academics, including economists
and law school professors. The bulk of the presenters
advocated a more aggressive posture towards these arrangements than
the courts have recently adopted.
Conditional pricing programs. Conditional
pricing generally encompasses pricing, discounting and contracting
practices in which a company's prices charged will vary
depending upon the level of purchases the customer makes from the
company's competitors. Examples include:
- Bundled discounts: Supplier X, which sells
dominant product A and competitive product B, grants a discount on
product A (which the customers have to buy) so long as customers
buy a certain percentage of their needs of product B from Supplier
X, rather than from its competitors.
