Competition law sits directly at the intersection of corporate strategy and legal constraint. Executives make decisions every day about pricing, acquisitions, distribution, partnerships, intellectual property, platforms, suppliers, competitors, labor, market entry, exclusivity, bundling, data, and artificial intelligence. Many of those decisions are legitimate forms of vigorous competition. Others can create serious antitrust exposure when they suppress independent rivalry, facilitate coordination, exclude competitors unlawfully, or allow transactions to substantially lessen competition.
Antitrust & Competition is an advanced Junior MBA course designed to teach students how senior managers recognize and manage competition-law risk while still competing aggressively and lawfully. It does not repeat introductory business-law material or provide a simple survey of statutes. Instead, it examines the actual strategic situations in which antitrust questions arise: competitor communications, pricing decisions, information exchanges, trade associations, joint ventures, distribution arrangements, platform governance, dominant-firm conduct, mergers and acquisitions, serial acquisitions, labor markets, intellectual-property licensing, algorithms, and international expansion.
The U.S. framework principally draws upon the Sherman Act, Clayton Act, and Federal Trade Commission Act, with federal enforcement divided principally between the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission. Section 7 of the Clayton Act addresses acquisitions whose effect may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly, while the Sherman Act addresses agreements restraining trade and monopolization-related conduct.
This advanced course also reflects contemporary enforcement realities. The DOJ and FTC’s 2023 Merger Guidelines remain an important statement of the analytical frameworks used by the federal agencies in merger review, although the Guidelines themselves are not binding law. Current agency materials also address competition involving workers, while DOJ and FTC sought public comment in 2026 concerning updated guidance for business collaborations, including issues involving algorithmic pricing, information sharing, data sharing, and labor collaborations.
The course is therefore built around the questions an executive actually needs to ask: Who are our competitors? What exactly are we agreeing to? What information are we exchanging? Could our pricing behavior be interpreted as coordinated? Does our distribution arrangement restrict competition? Could this acquisition eliminate an important rival or potential entrant? Are we controlling something competitors need to reach customers? Does our platform strategy create exclusion risks? And when should management stop the conversation and involve antitrust counsel?
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
• Analyze competitive strategy through an advanced antitrust framework.
• Distinguish aggressive lawful competition from potentially anticompetitive conduct.
• Understand the executive significance of the Sherman Act, Clayton Act, FTC Act, and related competition rules.
• Recognize high-risk communications and agreements among competitors.
• Evaluate pricing decisions for price-fixing and related coordination risks.
• Analyze information exchanges among competitors.
• Evaluate trade-association participation and industry collaboration.
• Understand market definition, market power, and competitive effects.
• Analyze monopolization and exclusionary-conduct risks.
• Evaluate tying, bundling, exclusivity, loyalty arrangements, and access restrictions.
• Understand vertical relationships involving suppliers, distributors, retailers, and platforms.
• Evaluate price-discrimination issues relevant to certain commodity sales.
• Analyze joint ventures and strategic collaborations.
• Evaluate intellectual-property licensing from a competition perspective.
• Understand antitrust implications of digital platforms, data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
• Recognize competition issues involving workers and labor markets.
• Conduct executive-level antitrust assessment of mergers and acquisitions.
• Understand premerger review and regulatory investigation.
• Integrate antitrust due diligence into corporate-development strategy.
• Build effective enterprise antitrust compliance systems.
