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 l