Robert Bork's Contributions to Antitrust Perspectives on Tying Behavior

Robert Bork was one of the key proponents of the traditional Chicago school view of tying and antitrust, which is that tying can never be used to extend or leverage market power from one market to another, so it should also never be an antitrust violation. In this paper, we review the traditional Chicago school perspective and, in particular, Bork's arguments on the topic and then discuss how these arguments relate to the more recent theoretical literature on the subject, which takes a game-theoretic approach. We then discuss Bork's later views on tying concerning the Microsoft case. We include a discussion of whether these later views of tying and antitrust were different from his earlier views or, instead, whether it was the nature of the cases that had changed.