Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/20-512_gfbh.pdf
Page Number: 21.0

Cite as:  594 U. S. ____ (2021) 

17 

Opinion of the Court 

Id.,  at  217.  Usually,  joint  ventures  enjoying  such  small
market  share  are  incapable  of  impairing  competition. 
Should they reduce their output, “there would be no effect 
upon market price because firms making up the other 94% 
of the market would simply take over the abandoned busi-
ness.”  Ibid.;  see  also  7  Areeda  &  Hovenkamp  ¶1507a,
p. 444 (2017) (If “the exercise of market power is not plau-
sible, the challenged practice is legal”); Polk  Bros., Inc.  v. 
Forest City Enterprises, Inc., 776 F. 2d 185, 191 (CA7 1985) 
(“Unless the firms have the power to raise price by curtail-
ing output, their agreement is unlikely to harm consumers,
and it makes sense to understand their cooperation as be-
nign or beneficial”).

At the other end, some agreements among competitors so 
obviously  threaten  to  reduce  output  and  raise  prices  that
they might be condemned as unlawful per se or rejected af-
ter only a quick look.  See Dagher, 547 U. S., at 7, n. 3; Cal-
ifornia Dental Assn. v. FTC, 526 U. S. 756, 770 (1999).  Rec-
ognizing the inherent limits on a court’s ability to master
an entire industry—and aware that there are often hard-to-
see  efficiencies  attendant  to  complex  business  arrange-
ments—we take special care not to deploy these condemna-
tory tools until we have amassed “considerable experience
with  the  type  of  restraint  at  issue”  and  “can  predict  with
confidence that it would be invalidated in all or almost all 
instances.”  Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, 
Inc., 551 U. S. 877, 886–887 (2007); Easterbrook, On Iden-
tifying Exclusionary Conduct, 61 Notre Dame L. Rev. 972, 
975 (1986) (noting that it can take “economists years, some-
times  decades,  to  understand  why  certain  business  prac-
tices work [and] determine whether they  work because of 
increased efficiency or exclusion”); see also infra, at 26–27 
(further reasons for caution). 

None of this helps the NCAA.  The NCAA accepts that its 
members collectively enjoy monopsony power in the market 
for  student-athlete  services,  such  that  its  restraints  can