The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of claims that leading medical-surgical product distributors violated antitrust laws by offering bundled package deals. The lawsuit asserted that the distributors designed their bundling arrangements to prevent customers from buying some types of surgical products from a smaller distributor offering a limited range of products at lower prices. The appellate court affirmed the lower court’s ruling for defendants because the plaintiff could not demonstrate that defendants had the requisite market power to exclude competition and failed to establish antitrust injury.
While typical bundling and tying cases examine conduct by a single dominant firm, this decision tackles parallel tying and bundling by two competitors. The opinion also sets forth an analytic framework to evaluate tying claims under the rule of reason rather than the more commonly applied per se tying rule.
