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@brecklundin: glad you find the issue interesting. There plenty of nuances here, some of which are probably interesting only to a limited audience. The main thing I would say is that the Supreme Court's Leegin decision did not suddenly make a broad category of conduct "legal"--it really was about the ease or difficulty of proving an antitrust violation. The court basically said that vertical price agreements are not "by definition" bad for competition; defendants can try to show that their arrangement was not harmful. This result was widely expected and applauded by many economists. The legislative proposals responding to this decision are not necessarily grounded in sound economic theory.
Moreover, the Supreme Court decision has no immediate relevance to the "agency" issue I mentioned. The "agency" defense would have been just as valid (or invalid) prior to the decision.
That's interesting about the cameras. 30-50% price jumps sound like a real concern. I have to wonder what was really going on there. Normally you would look to competition from other brands (rather than other retailers) to prevent increases like that. Now if the manufacturers were agreeing on price hikes, that's totally illegal. However, due to a phenomenon called "conscious parallelism" / "economic interdependence," it is very possible to see large parallel price increases in a small market that aren't the result of a conspiracy . . .
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