Key result
Price discrimination using meeting competition may improve oligopoly social welfare when strong markets are more competitive.
Provides an economic justification for the 'meeting competition' defense under the Robinson-Patman Act.
May justify MCD in primary-line RPA cases with asymmetric competition; leaves open empirical validation before policy shifts.
This paper finds that price discrimination tends to enhance social welfare under oligopoly when the number of firms in the strong market is higher than in the weak market. As a result, we obtain a fundamental justification for the “meeting competition” defense (MCD) under the Robinson‐Patman Act (RPA): In cases of primary‐line injury, when the strong market is more competitive than the weak market, the use of MCD may allow price discrimination to improve social welfare. This outcome holds true regardless of whether price discrimination occurs in the final good market or intermediate good market, and it is robust to the nature of competition.
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Aguirre et al. (2025) studied this question. Meeting competition defense (MCD) was evaluated on Social welfare. Price discrimination using the meeting competition defense may improve social welfare under oligopoly when the strong market is more competitive than the weak market.
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