Abstract
After nearly a decade of litigation, including a parallel action brought by the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice, several appeals, and a denial of a writ of certiorari by the US Supreme Court, marketers who use exclusive-dealing and pricing agreements to control their channels of distribution found some comfort in the decision of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Howard Hess Dental Laboratories v. Dentsply International, Inc. However, indirect purchasers from these marketers, who may be injured by what was found to be fundamentally monopolistic behavior, were left unprotected. Clearly, creating the type of contractual relationships that Dentsply developed is very dangerous, particularly when the firm is in a dominant market position. Even under their current noninterventionist antitrust policy, seeking and achieving a monopoly through predatory exclusive-dealing and pricing agreements will not be tolerated.
