Bundling is the setting of the total price of a purchase of several products or services from one seller at a lower level than the sum of the prices of the products or services purchased separately from several sellers. Typically, one of the bundled items (the "primary product") is available only from the seller engaging in the bundling, while the other item or items (the "secondary product") can be obtained from several sellers. The effect of the practice is to divert purchasers who need the primary product to the bundling seller and away from other sellers of only the secondary product. For that reason, the practice may be held an antitrust violation as it was in ''
SmithKline Corp. v. Eli Lilly & Co.'' and ''
LePage's, Inc. v. 3M''.
[324 F.3d 141 (3d. Cir. 2003).]
Further reading
* U.S. Dep't of Justice
Chapter 5 ''Antitrust Issues in the Tying and Bundling of Intellectual Property Rights'' in (2007).
pp. 105-06 (ed. Roger D. Blair and D. Daniel Sokol 2014).
See also
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Product bundling
In marketing, product bundling is offering several products or services for sale as one combined product or service package. It is a common feature in many imperfectly competitive product and service markets. Industries engaged in the practice ...
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Unbundling
Unbundling is a neologism to describe how the ubiquity of mobile devices, Internet connectivity, consumer web technologies, social media and information access in the 21st century is affecting older institutions (education, broadcasting, newsp ...
References
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Competition law
United States antitrust case law
Bundled products or services