id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cblr-3029	Antitrust Committee, ABCNY	The Role of Economics and Economists in Antitrust Law	2004	40	.pdf	application/pdf	13124	470	45	More formally, the Guidelines define a relevant market as a product (or group of products) that is sold by a group of sellers who, if they acted in concert (as a hypothetical monopolist), could bring about a small but significant and nontransitory increase in price (SSNIP).177 These principles apply to the delineation of geographic markets as well as product markets. ' As to structural economic evidence, the opinion lists a number of factors that indicate that price fixing is both feasible and more likely than if other conditions prevailed in the market: (1) few sellers (it is easier to reach an agreement among a small group); (2) a homogenous product with no good substitutes outside the market (this reduces the number of terms the conspirators have to agree to); (3) a large number of buyers, including small buyers (making it more difficult for buyers to protect themselves); (4) price is transparent (i.e., cheating by a competitor can be detected); (5) those that deviate from the cartel can be punished (without a punishment mechanism, the conspirators will have no reason not to cheat on the agreement in order to gain market share); (6) the defendants have considerable excess capacity (thus, absent a price-fixing conspiracy, prices are likely to be near incremental rather than total costs); (7) Judge Posner noted that the plaintiff did not develop evidence as to the difference between incremental and total costs, where the larger the spread between the two, the more that defendants have to gain from fixing prices; and (8) market-wide price discrimination in markets with homogenous products (this allows the conspirators to offer competitive prices to buyers that 156 Id. at 655.	cache/cblr-3029.pdf	txt/cblr-3029.txt