Fiona Scott Morton

Fiona M. Scott Morton is the Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics at the Yale University School of Management. Her area of academic research is empirical industrial organization, with a focus on empirical studies of competition. Her published articles range widely across industries, from magazines, to shipping, to pharmaceuticals, to internet retailing, and are published in leading economics journals. From 2011-12 Professor Scott Morton served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she helped enforce the nation’s antitrust laws. At Yale SOM she teaches courses in the area of competitive strategy. She served as Associate Dean from 2007-10 and has won the School’s teaching award twice.

Split the Legal, Economic and Policy Arguments of the Draft Merger Guidelines

To support the Agencies’ goals of stronger antitrust enforcement, Fiona Scott Morton recommends breaking the draft Merger Guidelines into three documents that clarify the Guidelines’ legal and economic justifications and overarching goals and priorities.

The Life of Antitrust’s Consumer Welfare Model

“Consumer welfare” as an objective of antitrust law and regulation has its origins in several vague and even conflicting ideas of how...

Fighting New Antitrust Rules Is a Bad Move for Big Tech

With new limits on platforms taking effect in the EU and U.S. politicians showing greater willingness to defy tech titans, companies would...

Why Congress Should Pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act

The bill, which is the Senate is expected to vote on soon, would improve competition, increase innovation, benefit consumers, and provide the...

How Europe Can Enforce the Digital Markets Act Effectively 

As the European Commission gets ready to embark on the complicated task of implementing the recently agreed-upon Digital Market Act, which would...

What Economists Mean When They Say “Consumer Welfare Standard”

Though coined by academic economists, the term “consumer welfare standard” has been captured and changed by the economic school of thought known...

The Real Dish on the T-Mobile/Sprint Merger: A Disastrous Deal From the Start

The Trump-era DOJ’s decision to allow the T-Mobile/Sprint merger will go down as one of the worst merger-enforcement mistakes in decades. This...

Preventing Drug Shortages and Saving Lives: The Role of Quality and Reliability Standards

Prescription drug shortages have become more common in recent years, interrupting usual medical care and increasing patient risk and system costs, but...

How Will the Digital Markets Act Regulate Big Tech?

While the recently introduced Digital Markets Act rules might change prior to final approval, there is a lot to consider already. What...

Addictive Social Media: Why We Need Regulation and Competition for Digital Platforms

Social media is associated with the prevalence of mood disorders, depression, and anxiety. With no regulations to address the dangers of addictive...

Latest news

Merged Firms Offer Less Product Variety

In new research, Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Christopher Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu find that mergers and acquisitions often lead to the merged firm offering less product variety than when the two firms operated pre-merger.

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.