Why All Antitrust Claims Are Refusal to Deal Claims and What That Means for Policy

The refusal to deal claim in antitrust is, at its core, a prohibition on discriminatory supply of an input to downstream buyers. However, all in-house production requires such discrimination in supply. To produce, a firm must keep the input to itself, thereby discriminating against buyers in favor of itself, and then the firm must choose which components to combine with the input to produce the final product. When a firm instead supplies the input on nondiscriminatory terms to others, the firm lets buyers decide which components to combine with the input. Antitrust proscribes discrimination in the supply of inputs in those occasional circumstances in which buyers would do a better job of choosing the product components to combine with the input than would the firm itself. All antitrust claims, from the traditional refusal to deal doctrine itself to exclusive dealing, tying, intrabrand restraints, mergers and collusion, amount to variations on this single proscription. The implication is that a blanket ban on self-preferencing, which is another name for the discriminatory supply of inputs, would destroy production. But the implication is also that eliminating the refusal to deal doctrine would force the elimination of all of antitrust.