Law360, New York ( November 8, 2016, 11:02 AM EST) -- Exclusive dealing agreements, while common across industries, raise real antitrust issues for companies with arguably high market shares. The anti-competitive argument is that while the agreements might yield lower prices for some customers in the short run, all customers might suffer in the long run if enough competitors are foreclosed from the market and unable to compete. Determining which part of that argument predominates requires an analysis that goes much deeper than the words in the agreement. While some scholars have advanced elegant theories to answer that question, most courts evaluating exclusive agreements have simply tried to determine if the amount of the market foreclosed to competitors by the exclusivity is "big enough."...