Booksellers call for probe of online book price wars

Written by Free Audio Books - Free audiobooks on October 23, 2009 – 5:22 am -

The American Booksellers Association on Thursday asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate online book price wars underway by Amazon.com, Wal-Mart and Target.

In a letter from the 109-year-old trade organization representing independent booksellers, the ABA’s board told antitrust officials that the discounted pre-sales of hardback bestsellers for $9, “constitute illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers.”  Dallas News

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
  1. By Robert Moskowitz on Oct 23, 2009 | Reply

    http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv28n4/v28n4-4.pdf

    … imagine how a predatory pricing lawsuit could be used
    to help organize the tacit collusion scheme in a legally privileged
    way. The plaintiff firm, unhappy with price cuts by a rival,
    files a complaint detailing exactly what is wrong with the defendant’s
    price cuts and what reasonable prices would be. Then
    follows a prolonged period of discovery—often years—in
    which the parties exchange reams of sensitive competitive documents
    and senior executives testify about their pricing strategies,
    business plans, productive capacity, costs, and many more
    pieces of business information that will come very handy to
    both sides when considering future pricing and output decisions.
    While discovery and trial takes place, a judge will be
    closely scrutinizing the parties’ pricing behavior and perhaps
    even enjoining the defendant from lowering its prices during
    the pendency of the lawsuit. Several judges have issued injunctions
    against defendants, prohibiting them from lowering their
    prices until a final adjudication of the case. So there we have
    several ingredients of a successful tacit collusion scheme: price
    signaling, information exchange, policing mechanisms, and
    even sanctions for deviating from supracompetitive prices.

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