Antitrust Limits on Patent Settlements: A New Approach*
提出一种通过审查合同经济结构来普遍适用反垄断标准的方法，避免推测企业私下信念，从而有效规制竞争企业间的专利和解协议。
Abstract Patent settlements between rivals restrain competition in many different ways. Antitrust requires that their anticompetitive effects are reasonably commensurate with the firms' expectations about (counterfactual) patent litigation. Because these expectations are private and non‐verifiable, this standard is hard to administer; to date, it has been successfully applied only within a very narrow class of agreements. We show that it can be applied universally by policing the economic structure of the firms' contract. This approach determines whether settlement outcomes will be antitrust‐compliant for any private beliefs the firms might have, thus avoiding the need to speculate about such beliefs.