Cite as: 526 U. S. 756 (1999)
Syllabus
benefit. The Act does not cover all membership organizations of profit-making corporations without more. However, the economic benefits conferred upon CDA's profit-seeking professionals plainly fall within the object of enhancing its members' "profit," which is the Act's jurisdictional touchstone. The Act's logic and purpose comport with this result, and its legislative history is not inconsistent with this interpretation. Pp. 765-769.
2. Where any anticompetitive effects of given restraints are far from intuitively obvious, the rule of reason demands a more thorough enquiry into the consequences of those restraints than the abbreviated analysis the Ninth Circuit performed in this case. Pp. 769-781.
(a) An abbreviated or "quick-look" analysis is appropriate when an observer with even a rudimentary understanding of economics could conclude that the arrangements in question have an anticompetitive effect on customers and markets. See, e. g., National Collegiate Athletic Assn. v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., 468 U. S. 85. This case fails to present a situation in which the likelihood of anticompetitive effects is comparably obvious, for the CDA's advertising restrictions might plausibly be thought to have a net procompetitive effect or possibly no effect at all on competition. Pp. 769-771.
(b) The discount and nondiscount advertising restrictions are, on their face, designed to avoid false or deceptive advertising in a market characterized by striking disparities between the information available to the professional and the patient. The existence of significant challenges to informed decisionmaking by the customer for professional services suggests that advertising restrictions arguably protecting patients from misleading or irrelevant advertising call for more than cursory treatment. In applying cursory review, the Ninth Circuit brushed over the professional context and described no anticompetitive effects from the discount advertising bar. The CDA's price advertising rule appears to reflect the prediction that any costs to competition associated with eliminating across-the-board advertising will be outweighed by gains to consumer information created by discount advertising that is exact, accurate, and more easily verifiable. This view may or may not be correct, but it is not implausible; and neither a court nor the Commission may initially dismiss it as presumptively wrong. The CDA's plausible explanation for its nonprice advertising restrictions, namely that restricting unverifiable quality claims would have a procompetitive effect by preventing misleading or false claims that distort the market, likewise rules out the Ninth Circuit's use of abbreviated rule-of-reason analysis for those restrictions. The obvious anticompetitive effect that triggers such analysis has not been shown. Pp. 771-778.
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