After the genericism piece, brands were on my mind and luckily some friends knew it. My brand project was the focus of my work at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology. Brett Frischmann knew that Spencer Waller was thinking about brands as was I. Spencer and I connected, and Brands, Competition and the Law was born. We argued that brands do much more than trademark or antitrust law recognizes. Brands indicate more than source and quality, enable non-price factors to differentiate products, and drive consumption for non-functional reasons. Furthermore, as business and marketing folks know, brands allow for rent extraction. Brands allow prices to remain high even in markets where one might expect them to converge. Brands “ensconce[e] price dispersion, instead of a competitive market that brings prices down, prices remain dispersed above marginal cost.” Michael Baye and John Morgan’s work shows this for an online market no less. We turned to antitrust and found that antitrust law simply does not account for brands well. Market definition is odd here. For a strong brand is in a way its own market. Glynn Lunney’s work on Trademark Monopolies (no ssrn that I saw) was most helpful there. Price discrimination might signal a change in how one defines the market. Brands allow such actions but are ignored. There’s more on how understanding brands would change the way anti-trust might run. But I leave those interested to read the paper OR there is this offer.
The work led to a conference at University College London hosted by Ioannis Lianos where our abstract framed the day’s discussion.
Now, if you like, the follow up conference is in the U.S.
It will be in Chicago on October 19, 2012. Registration is here.