The 'Services' Explanation for Resale Price Maintenance (RPM): Deleterious Results Missed in the Economics Literature and in Legal Decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Policy discussions and a Supreme Court decision interpret retailer services induced by retail price maintenance (RPM) as enhancing consumer surplus (CS) and welfare enhancing, marginalizing dissenting opinions which use similar models but with different parameters. However if presales services stimulate demand by providing information about a product's value they need not raise post sale value in use. Inframarginal consumers' presales perceived value may increase, but their post sale value may be unchanged so their supposed CS gains are ephemeral, their actual surplus falls proportional to price increase. We show, even adding in gains to marginal consumers, effects on CS are far more negative than conceived of in this literature. Consequently, in a rule of reason antitrust environment, if RPM is challenged without alleging collusion or exclusion, presales demand inducing information provision is a flimsy defence if CS is the standard, and not always convincing if total surplus is the standard.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".