Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: Bundling has emerged as one of the most complicated competition policy issues of the day, from markets as ordinary as that for transparent tape (to 3M, Scotch tape to the rest of us)' to those as complex and fast-moving as telecommunications.I want to try to carve off a piece of the bundling question, namely that relating to what I will call "scope-of-permission" goods.Scope-of-permission goods deliver precisely the same good to each individual but define multiple products through the scope of access-through the scope of permissionthat the producer gives to each consumer.These goods typically have arbitrary scope: we could add to them or subtract from them quite easily.As I detail below, scope-of-permission goods naturally include computer software, such as Microsoft Windows, and licenses from copyright collectives, such as American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) -products at stake in two of the most prominent antitrust controversies.In framing the ASCAP and Microsoft cases as addressing scope-of-permission goods, we see that both cases turn on the same question: when should we invest in reducing entry barriers?The chosen structure of the scope-of-permission good-the blanket licenses in ASCAP and the design of Windowscreates entry barriers, barriers to competing performing rights organizations in the case of ASCAP and barriers to competing browsers and now media players in the case of Microsoft.The critical issue is the extent to which we are willing to reengineer these scope-of-permission goods-to re-scope them-to enable t
Source: bepress Legal Repository
Author: Randal C. Picker
Institution: University of Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Chicago
OpenAlex ID: W1479706613