Antitrust advocates are hailing Amazon’s decision to stop requiring third-party sellers to offer products on Amazon at the lowest prices they charge for their products anywhere. But the decision is decidedly second-best: consumers would be much better off were government to regulate Amazon’s fees, and allow the platform to keep those “most-favored-nation” (MFN) rules.
The elimination of MFNs, argue antitrust experts, will promote competition between Amazon and other ecommerce platforms, by allowing third-party sellers to pass on savings to consumers from doing business on lower-fee platforms. If Barnes & Noble, for example, charges a bookseller less to sell books on the Barnes & Noble website, the bookseller will now be free to charge a lower price for its books on the Barnes & Noble website than the seller charges for the same books on Amazon. That in turn will drive business to the Barnes & Noble website, giving Barnes & Noble a reward for lowering its fees and innovating in cost reduction.
That would be the right way to think about MFNs, if the choice were only between laissez faire and antitrust. But there is in fact a third option, which strictly dominates both of the others. Namely, to regulate Amazon’s fees. If Amazon were required to obtain federal government approval of the fees it charges third-party sellers for use of its platform, then regulators could insist on low fees, and even force Amazon to innovate in cost reduction by mandating fees that are below current costs (preventing Amazon from turning a profit unless it innovates). That would unleash all of the benefits that greater competition between platforms promises to provide.
But it would also preserve advantages that platform competition simply cannot offer. Consumers, after all, like knowing that the price they get on Amazon is the best price available anywhere for the product. Anyone who has wasted hours on one travel website after another trying to find the best airfare knows how much time and effort is required to get the best price when such guarantees do not exist.
Indeed, through MFNs, Amazon effectively leveraged its size to impose a law of one price for consumer products across the internet, and that had huge consumer benefits. Amazon is so big that virtually all products of any interest to consumers are sold through its website. By imposing MFNs, Amazon ensured that consumers wouldn’t need to engage in wasteful and time-consuming searches for the best internet prices when they went to buy online. By going to Amazon, consumers could be sure to find any product available on the internet at the best possible price. Amazon used its size to make life easy for consumers, by turning the internet into a one-stop shop.
We must think of Amazon’s MFNs as accomplishing something that we might ideally want a government regulator to accomplish: making it impossible for anyone, anywhere on the internet, to get ripped off by being charged a higher price for a product than a price available for the same product somewhere else. The MFNs, in other words, were an internet-wide guarantee against price discrimination, that nemesis of all consumer welfare.
While the MFNs did prevent third-party sellers from passing the gains from buying on cheaper platforms on to consumers, the MFNs’ elimination of price discrimination was also valuable to consumers. To give but one example, consider that price discriminating firms frequently use search costs to distinguish between high and low willingness to pay buyers: they offer lower prices only to those who signal their inability to pay more by engaging in wasteful searches for better prices. The poor must clip coupons to get lower prices — or waste time searching for better prices on seller websites or obscure platforms — whereas the rich sail through checkout lines. The MFNs spared consumers such indignities.
Their demise undermines the public benefit of one internet price that Amazon was able to provide to consumers thanks to the firm’s size. And that’s why government regulation of Amazon’s fees is better than either laissez faire or the antitrust solution of simply eliminating the MFNs.
A fee-regulated Amazon would be unable to take advantage of the MFNs to charge higher fees, or to fail to continue to invest in innovations that would reduce the cost of providing platform services, thus the concerns about MFNs that antitrust and competition policy are intended to address would also be addressed by fee regulation. But fee regulation would not require elimination of the MFNs, and would therefore preserve the huge benefits to consumers that come from the guarantee of always being able to find the lowest internet price in one place: Amazon.
Thus fee regulation would realize all of the benefits of competition, while inflicting none of the costs on consumers. As in so many areas, we must therefore understand the antitrust victory here to be only relative at best. Society might be better off as a result of the demise of Amazon’s MFNs, but only if the gains to consumers in the form of more platform competition happen to outweigh the losses to consumers from the demise of the guarantee of one internet price and the associated return of price discrimination. But even if society is rendered better off by the demise of the MFNs, it certainly is not rendered as much better off as it would be were policymakers simply to step in to regulate Amazon’s fees and allow MFNs, and the Internet of one price, to prevail.
Antitrust is a decidedly second-best policy here.