From Volume 85, Number 3 (March 2012)
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As the contributions to this symposium prove, the Standard Oil case continues to inform many aspects of current antitrust policy. Part of Standard Oil’s significance, however, has been lost over time. The Supreme Court condemned a range of conduct by Standard Oil as anticompetitive, including predatory pricing. Predatory pricing occurs when a firm prices its product below cost in order to drive its competitors from the market. Once enough rivals have exited the market, the predator raises price and earns a stream of monopoly profits.
In the decades following the opinion, the conventional wisdom held that Standard Oil had engaged in predatory pricing. The Standard Oil opinion stood for the proposition that using predatory pricing to acquire or maintain a monopoly violates Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The opinion did not define the contours of predatory pricing, neither explicitly saying that a predatory price is a price below cost nor specifying what measure of cost courts should use. Nevertheless, the opinion laid the groundwork for future federal courts to address these questions and to provide more structure to the predatory pricing cause of action.
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