Read the following passage carefully.
For decades, the judicial approach to antitrust law in the United States was largely guided by the structuralist paradigm, which held that concentrated market structures inherently produced anticompetitive behavior. Under this view, courts viewed almost all vertical restraints—agreements between firms at different levels of the supply chain, such as manufacturers and distributors—with deep suspicion. Practices like territorial exclusivity or resale price maintenance were frequently classified as *per se* illegal. This classification was based on the assumption that such restraints inevitably stifled competition and harmed consumers by reducing intra-brand rivalry.
However, the ascendance of the Chicago School of economics in the late 1970s precipitated a profound doctrinal shift. Chicago School scholars argued that antitrust analysis should be moored exclusively to the goal of maximizing economic efficiency, rather than protecting small competitors or preserving decentralized market structures. They demonstrated that many vertical restraints, previously presumed to be anticompetitive, actually served procompetitive ends by eliminating 'free-rider' problems. For instance, a manufacturer might grant a distributor exclusive territorial rights to incentivize the distributor to invest in point-of-sale services and advertising, preventing other distributors from reaping the benefits of those investments without sharing the costs. By prioritizing inter-brand competition (competition between different manufacturers) over intra-brand competition (competition between distributors of the same manufacturer's product), the Chicago School successfully persuaded courts to evaluate non-price vertical restraints under a 'rule of reason' analysis. This new standard required plaintiffs to demonstrate actual anticompetitive effects in a defined market, a stark departure from the previous presumption of automatic illegality.
Evaluate the following statement based on specific inferences supported by the passage:
Under the structuralist paradigm, vertical restraints were deemed anticompetitive primarily because they were thought to reduce competition among different manufacturers producing substitutable goods.
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