¶ 1. In this interlocutory appeal, plaintiff challenges the superior court’s decision denying his motion for class certification with respect to his lawsuit claiming that defendant Honeywell International, Inc. violated the Vermont Consumer Fraud Act (CFA) by engaging in deceptive tactics to create an unlawful monopoly that resulted in overcharges to consumers for the company’s round thermostat. We reverse the superior court’s decision insofar as plaintiff has made a sufficient showing at this juncture of the proceedings to demonstrate that questions of law and fact common to the class will predominate and that a class action will be a superior method for resolving the controversy.
¶ 2. In late 2004, plaintiff filed a one-count complaint alleging that Honeywell created an unlawful monopoly on round thermostats by engaging in deceptive tactics that violated the CFA, 9 V.S.A. § 2453 (prohibiting unfair or deceptive acts or practices in commerce). The complaint followed a federal court decision denying Honeywell’s motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent a competitor from manufacturing and selling a round thermostat. See
Eco Mfg. LLC v. Honeywell Int’l, Inc.,
¶ 3. Following plaintiffs filing of his 2004 complaint, the matter was removed to federal court on federal question jurisdiction and consolidated with similar actions against Honeywell from other states. The state actions were then transferred to another federal court, which found an inadequate basis for removal and therefore remanded each action to its respective state court without reaching a decision on pending state law claims.
In re Circular Thermostat,
No. MDL CO5-01673WHA,
*128 ¶ 4. In addition to alleging violations of the CFA, plaintiff sought to certify a CFA class composed of “[a]ll similarly situated consumer purchasers residing in the State of Vermont (excluding governmental entities, Defendants, and subsidiaries and affiliates of Defendants) who indirectly purchased from the Defendants, for their own use and not for resale, round thermostats between June 30, 1986 and the present.” Thus, plaintiff sought to bring an indirect purchaser class action under the CFA.
¶ 5. In a May 15, 2008 decision, the superior court denied Honeywell’s motion for summary judgment, in which Honeywell claimed that plaintiffs action was barred by the applicable statute of limitations and that plaintiff would be unable to prove any injury, as required by the CFA. At the same time, the court denied plaintiffs motion for class certification, concluding that (1) plaintiffs expert did not offer a viable methodology to show either class-wide impact resulting from Honeywell’s alleged deceptive conduct or how the conduct affected members of the class differently, and thus plaintiff failed to demonstrate that questions of law or fact common to the proposed class would predominate; and (2) plaintiff failed to present a feasible plan for identifying potential class members, and thus could not demonstrate that the proposed class action was administratively manageable and superior to individual actions.
¶ 6. Upon plaintiffs motion, we granted plaintiff permission to file an interlocutory appeal of the superior court’s decision denying class certification. On appeal, plaintiff argues that the superior court erred: (1) by not applying the proper standard for determining whether to grant his motion for class certification; (2) by weighing the evidence and looking beyond the legal adequacy of his proposed methods of proof; (3) by not presuming that overcharges to direct customers of Honeywell were passed onto the indirect consumers that make up the proposed class; (4) by conflating the concepts of fact of damages and proof of damages in determining that common questions of law and fact would not predominate; and (5) by concluding that a class action was not the superior method for resolving the dispute.
¶ 7. Before taking up these claims of error, we first examine the applicable law on consumer fraud actions and motions for class certification. The CFA, which is to be liberally construed to protect the public and encourage fair and honest competition,
*129
State v. Custom Pools,
¶ 8. Regarding class certification, the basic prerequisites require that: (1) the class is numerous enough that joinder of all of its members is impracticable; (2) questions of law or fact are common to the class; (3) the representative parties are making claims and defenses that are typical of the class; and (4) the representative parties will adequately protect the interests of the class. V.R.C.P. 23(a). In this case, the superior court concluded that the proposed class satisfied each of these four prerequisites, and Honeywell does not challenge that conclusion.
¶ 9. Beyond these prerequisites, class actions are maintainable only if at least one of the more onerous conditions set forth in Rule 23(b) is satisfied. Neither the parties nor the superior court identified Rule 23(b)(1) or (2) as a stumbling block to class certification. Hence, as is often the situation in a request for class certification, this case comes down to whether “the court finds that the questions of law or fact common to the members of the class predominate over any questions affecting only individual members, and that a class action is superior to other available methods for the fair and efficient adjudication of the controversy.” V.R.C.P. 23(b)(3). The rule also lists several factors for the court to consider in determining whether Rule 23(b)(3) is satisfied, including “the difficulties likely to be encountered in the management of a class action.” Id. 23(b)(3)(D).
¶ 10. As a general rule, class actions are of limited and special application and are not to be casually authorized.
Salatino
*130
v. Chase,
¶ 11. On appeal, plaintiff first argues that the superior court erred in ruling on his motion for class certification by applying a rigorous federal standard that is incompatible with
Alger,
in which we stated that “the certification decision must be made wholly apart from a consideration of the merits of the case using the standards set out under Rule 23(a)
&
(b).”
¶ 12. Plaintiff reads too much into the quoted statement in Alger. Alger was not a consumer-fraud action, and the CFA’s remedial nature has nothing to do with the standard that trial courts generally apply in considering motions for class certifications. The isolated statement in Alger that plaintiff relies upon is not part of a detailed analysis of the proper standard for considering certification motions, but rather is a cautionary statement reminding the trial court that its task is to examine the Rule 23 criteria rather than weigh the merits of the case. Indeed, courts have recognized that
while it is not proper to reach the merits of a claim when determining class certification, “this principle should not be talismanically invoked to artificially limit a trial court’s examination of the factors necessary to a reasoned determination of whether a plaintiff has met her burden of establishing each of the Rule 23 class action requirements.”
In re Domestic Air Transp. Antitrust Litig.,
¶ 13. That is not to say there is widespread agreement on the extent to which trial courts may delve into the merits of a case in considering the Rule 23 criteria. To the contrary, federal and state courts continue to debate the extent to which an examination of the Rule 23 criteria may immerse a trial court into the merits of a case. More particularly, the debate often focuses on the extent to which trial courts must test expert methodologies aimed at satisfying the Rule 23 criteria. Cases in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals are illustrative of this debate. In
Caridad v. Metro-North Commuter R.R.,
¶ 14. The Second Circuit later backtracked from some of its earlier statements, concluding that a trial court must resolve underlying factual disputes relevant to any of the Rule 23 criteria, even if there is an overlap between a Rule 23 requirement and a merits issue.
In re Initial Pub. Offering Sec. Litig.,
¶ 15. We are not so confident that we can avoid the above-noted quagmire in this case by labeling examination of the experts’ dueling opinions as a legal question completely separate from the merits of the case or the resolution of factual disputes. There is little doubt that “[ijntertwined with the scope of our review on appeal is the question of how far a [trial] court should go in testing legal and factual premises at the class certification stage.”
In re New Motor Vehicles Canadian Export Antitrust Litig.,
¶ 16. This discussion brings us to plaintiff’s second claim of error — that the superior court erred by weighing his expert evidence and looking beyond the legal adequacy of the methods of proof in denying class certification based on its conclusion that common issues would not predominate. According to plaintiff, despite the court’s statement that it need not delve into the merits of the dispute, the superior court effectively required him to prove his case at the class certification stage of the proceedings. In plaintiff’s view, the superior court’s responsibility at this stage of the litigation was limited to determining whether his evidence would use generalized proof common to the class, thereby demonstrating that issues of law and fact common to the *133 class would predominate. We agree with plaintiff that the trial court applied too rigorous a standard in denying the class certification.
¶ 17. As noted, to certify a class, the trial court must find that “the questions of law or fact common to the members of the class predominate over any questions affecting only individual members, and that a class action is superior' to other available methods for the fair and efficient adjudication of the controversy.” V.R.C.P. 23(b)(3). Plaintiff is claiming an antitrust violation under the CFA. Typically, a plaintiff presenting an antitrust claim must prove (1) a violation of the antitrust laws (in this case, the CFA), (2) an injury or impact suffered as a result of that violation, and (3) an estimated measure of damages.
Sullivan v. Nat’l Football League,
¶ 18. The second element, then, is the key — has plaintiff made a sufficient showing that issues of law and fact common to the class will predominate with respect to the fact of impact or injury to the members of the proposed class? See
New Motor Vehicles,
¶ 19. After recognizing that plaintiffs expert, Dr. Roger Noll, is a thoroughly qualified expert in antitrust economics, the superior court found fatal flaws in the expert’s methodology for finding evidence of damages common to the proposed class of indirect consumers. The court acknowledged plaintiffs claims that the expert’s methodology would allow him to estimate the initial monopoly overcharge to direct customers and demonstrate that the initial overcharge would be passed on from the direct purchasers to the end users to some degree unless there existed a perfect substitute for the product that did not increase in price. Apparently accepting the first point as potentially provable and focusing on the second point, the court stated that it “is true in the aggregate as a matter of economic theory, but does not necessarily hold in any individual transaction . . . [or] any set of transactions which differ systematically.” The court further stated that plaintiff had failed to offer any evidence that (1) direct purchasers — hardware stores, heating system vendors, and contractors, for example — “were similarly situated to pass on any monopoly overcharge built into their wholesale costs,” or (2) *135 Honeywell exerted “vertical price control” to enforce a set retail pricing through the various intermediary distribution channels. In the court’s view, plaintiffs methodology offered nothing more than a “black box, into which go concededly-different monopoly overcharges and out of which is assumed to come the same consumer impact across the class.” Hence, the court concluded that it could not “apportion monopoly CFA damages between the direct purchasers and indirect purchasers without very highly individualized questions examining the market circumstances of each intermediary.”
¶20. The superior court noted that plaintiffs expert relied on Honeywell’s general guidelines estimating presumed markups by intermediaries in various distribution channels, and had further assumed that further discovery would uncover the basis for those estimates. But the court rejected the notion that further discovery would support the expert’s methodology, stating that the litigation had begun in 2004 and that plaintiff should have, at the class certification stage, “actual, concrete data from which to confirm or disconfirm whether the assumptions made by the defendant in pricing its goods are at all predictive of actual pass-on of any monopoly overcharge by intermediaries.” According to the court, even if it assumed that Honeywell imposed reasonably consistent monopoly prices on direct customers, plaintiff failed to produce any evidence that Honeywell controlled the ultimate retail price or dictated to direct purchasers “what portion of the monopoly overcharge they should bear and what portion they should pass on to indirect purchasers.”
¶ 21. Ultimately, the superior court determined that plaintiff had not presented a methodology for proving damages common to the class of indirect consumers that could account for the multiple and varied intermediary distribution channels in the thermostat market. Citing uncontroverted evidence suggesting that markups through distribution channels were neither uniform nor dependent on the number of intermediaries, the court concluded that no ascertainable aggregate damage amount could be justly allocated among the class and between the class and nonclass intermediaries.
¶22. Upon review of the record and relevant case law, we conclude that the superior court demanded too much of plaintiff at this stage of the litigation and that plaintiff provided potentially viable methodologies to demonstrate proof of injury in fact *136 common to the proposed class. As noted, neither the superior court at trial, nor Honeywell on appeal, seriously questioned plaintiff’s proposed methodology for demonstrating that Honeywell’s allegedly deceptive tactics resulted in monopolistic overcharges to the direct purchasers of its round thermostat. Plaintiffs expert proposed to show that, as the result of Honeywell’s monopolistic activities, the company’s price/cost margins for round thermostats exceeded the price/cost margins on other types of its thermostats that were subject to competition. To be sure, defendant’s expert challenged certain premises underlying this methodology, and the superior court expressed some skepticism as to whether plaintiff could prove the overcharge through this or other suggested methodologies. For the most part, however, Honeywell conceded, and the superior court presumed, that plaintiff had proposed at least a potentially viable methodology to estimate monopolistic overcharges to direct customers.
¶ 23. Thus, the principal basis for Honeywell’s opposition to the proposed class, as well as the superior court’s ultimate refusal to certify the class, was plaintiffs proffered methodology for showing proof common to the class that the monopolistic overcharges were passed on from the various intermediary distribution channels to the ultimate end users making up the proposed class. Plaintiff’s expert testified that: (1) economic theory assumes under normal circumstances that an increase in price will be passed on to end users, as long as there is no perfect substitute product that did not increase in price and none of the intermediaries are selling at a loss; (2) the magnitude of the pass-through depends on production technologies, costs, and the. state of competition among downstream industries, which in principle could lead to differences in the damages suffered by end users depending on the distribution channel from which they acquired the product; (3) the standard approach to accommodate this possibility is to undertake a statistical analysis of the relationship between the prices charged to end users and the distribution channels through which the product was acquired; and (4) this method should produce valid estimates of damages absent price discrimination. The expert further testified that such an analysis might not be necessary in this case because Honeywell’s own documents estimated the markups through each distribution channel and demonstrated that its pricing to direct customers was designed so that all end users would pay similar prices over all distribution channels. The expert *137 stated that once the basis for Honeywell’s markup estimates could be confirmed through further discovery, one could determine the damages to end users through those estimates.
¶ 24. As discussed above, the superior court determined that these methodologies were far too simplistic to account for the multiple and diverse distribution channels in the thermostat industry. The superior court also noted that, notwithstanding Honeywell’s goal of having all end users pay roughly the same price for its product, the evidence demonstrated that, in fact, end users paid widely varying prices for round thermostats both among and within each of the multiple distribution channels. Plaintiff argues, however, that focusing on the differences in prices paid by end users is a red herring insofar as the methodology proposed by his expert uses cost/price margins, rather than prices, in estimating damages. According to plaintiff, once the estimate of overcharge to direct customers is computed, the overcharge to end users can be computed, not by comparing prices, but by comparing price/cost margins through the various distribution channels. Cf.
In re Commercial Tissue Prods.,
¶25. In examining the difficult question of whether the superior court expected too much from plaintiff at this stage of the litigation and effectively ruled on the merits of his proposed methodology for demonstrating proof of injury common to the class, we must keep in mind that this Court, along with the vast majority of other state courts, has declined to adopt the United States Supreme Court’s “reasoning that to allow indirect purchaser lawsuits would unnecessarily complicate matters given 'the economic uncertainties and complexities involved in proving pass-on.’ ”
Romero,
¶ 26. With that in mind, and based on the record before us, we conclude that plaintiff has presented “common, generalized, logically probative methodologies to prove antitrust injury to class members, methodologies that are at the very least superficially acceptable to meet the predominance threshold.”
Romero,
¶27. It is well settled that “class damages may be proven in the aggregate,” or through generalized evidence.
Romero,
*140 ¶ 28. In sum, the superior court’s analysis went too far both by essentially requiring plaintiffs expert to prove plaintiffs case at the certification stage and by moving from fact of injury to amount of damages, which courts and commentators have uniformly recognized can be proved in class actions on an individualized basis if necessary. Plaintiff’s expert proposes to demonstrate through various methodologies and further discovery that direct customers paid monopolistic overcharges and that those overcharges were passed on through the various intermediary distribution channels to the proposed class of end users. The methodologies employ accepted economic theories and are potentially viable. Plaintiff still has, of course, the formidable task of convincing a jury that his theories demonstrate the existence in fact of overcharges in this case and that it is reasonable to assume that those overcharges were passed on to consumers. The jury may not assume an antitrust impact to end users merely from the existence of a proven conspiracy or some impact to direct customers, but may, based on plaintiff’s proposed methodologies, conclude that it is reasonable to assume the pass-through of monopolistic overcharges to end users. Ultimately, it is the jury’s responsibility to determine whether plaintiff may prevail based on his proposed methodologies.
¶ 29. We caution, as did the court in Romero, that
it is one thing at the class certification stage to allow certification based on what appear to be logically proba *141 tive general methodologies, and another thing to prove at trial that a high percentage of indirect purchasers were injured by their purchases of products in an anti-competitive market. Once past certification, Defendants will still be permitted to attack Plaintiffs’ methodologies at trial as to scientific reliability and as to sufficiency of proof of antitrust injury.
¶ 30. Before concluding, we must address the superior court’s further determination that a class action would not be “superior to other available methods for the fair and efficient adjudication of the controversy.” V.R.C.P. 23(b)(3). Essentially, the court ruled that: (1) there is no feasible plan for identifying class members, given that most end users are not likely to have receipts; and (2) allowing a novel or permissive method for identifying class members creates the potential for fraud. These speculative considerations should not preclude certifying the class before plaintiff has had an opportunity to propose methods for identifying class members. As a general rule, “if common questions are found to predominate in an antitrust action, then courts generally have ruled that the superiority prerequisite of Rule 23(b)(3) is satisfied.” 7AA C. Wright, A. Miller & M. Kane,
supra,
§ 1781, at 254-55. Further, most courts agree, “as a general proposition that, from a manageability perspective, a class action is a superior procedure to handle thousands of class members’ small claims when common issues of fact and law predominate and common methods of proving those claims exist.”
Romero,
*142
¶ 31. “The guiding principle for [Rule 23(b)](3) certification is that the interests of the parties can best be served by settling their differences in one single action.”
Commercial Tissue Prods.,
Reversed and remanded.
Notes
The cases that Honeywell and the superior court rely on in support of the notion that the multiple and varied intermediaries in this case make it too complex to
*140
come up with a methodology capable of determining whether overcharges were passed on to end users are distinguishable. For the most part, those cases involve situations in which the proposed class was made up of both end users and intermediaries and/or the product involved, unlike the thermostats in this ease, was incorporated into various other products that proceeded through diverse distribution channels. E.g.,
Methionine,