How the Agri-Stats Case Can Help Shape Treatment of Anticompetitive Information Exchanges: A Discussion Between Emily Bridges of the Food and Agriculture Impact Project and Professor Peter Carstensen

About this episode

Emily Bridges discusses the implications of the DOJ's case against Agri-Stats with antitrust scholar Peter Carstensen, focusing on information exchange in agricultural markets.

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, Emily Bridges of the Food and Agriculture Impact Project has a wide-ranging discussion with antitrust scholar Peter Carstensen about the role of information exchange in restricting competition in agricultural markets, focusing on how the DOJ's case against Agri-Stats addresses that threat. After covering the oligopolistic nature of many agricultural markets (2:45), the two do a deep dive on why information exchange can be so harmful to competition (11:04). Professor Carstensen explains how the law on information exchange has evolved and how that history has led to unfortunate ambiguity about the applicable standard (17:10). Professor Carstensen then explains why information exchange has been a particular problem in agricultural markets. He describes how recent cases in this area, including both private actions and the DOJ's case against the information aggregator, Agri-Stats, can play an important role in clarifying and strengthening enforcement against unjustified information exchanges (27:20). The discussion concludes with some thoughts about what we can expect from current trends in litigation over illegal information exchanges (48:50)…

People in this episode

Guests: Emily Bridges, Peter Carstensen

Topics covered

• information exchange
• anticompetitive behavior
• agricultural markets
• DOJ case
• legal standards
• litigation trends

Keywords

• Agri-Stats
• information exchange
• antitrust
• agriculture
• DOJ
• competition
• legal standards

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Food and Agriculture Impact Project, University of Arkansas School of Law, DOJ, Agri-Stats

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