Authors libby rittenberg 846

antitrust environment by appearing to reinvoke the doctrine of per se illegality In the government’s case against Visa and MasterCard, the government argued successfully that the behavior of the two firms was a per se violation of the Sherman Act The Sherman Act also aimed, in part, to prevent price-fixing, in which two or more firms agree to set prices or to coordinate their pricing policies For example, in the 1950s General Electric, Westinghouse, and several other manufacturers colluded to fix prices They agreed to assign market segments in which one firm would sell at a lower price than the others In 1961, the General Electric–Westinghouse agreement was declared illegal The companies paid a multimillion-dollar fine, and their officers served brief jail sentences In 2008, three manufactures of liquid crystal display panels—the flat screens used in televisions, cell phones, personal computers, and such—agreed to pay $585 million in fines for price fixing, with LG Display paying $400 million, Sharp Corporation paying $120 million, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes paying $65 million The $400 million fine to LG is still less than the record single fine of $500 million paid in 1999 by F Hoffman-LaRoche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, in a case involving fixing prices of vitamin supplements Other Antitrust Legislation Concerned about the continued growth of monopoly power, in 1914 Congress created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a five-member commission that, along with the antitrust division of the Justice Department, has the power to investigate firms that use illegal business practices Attributed to Libby Rittenberg and Timothy Tregarthen Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books/ Saylor.org 846