Hal Singer

Hal Singer is a managing director of Econ One and an adjunct professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. He is also the co-author of the e-book The Need for Speed: A New Framework for Telecommunications Policy for the 21st Century (Brookings Press 2013), and co-author of the book Broadband in Europe: How Brussels Can Wire the Information Society (Kluwer/Springer Press 2005). He is a recipient of the 2018 Antitrust Enforcement Award from the American Antitrust Institute for his work In Re Lidoderm Antitrust Litigation.

Neoliberal Economists Are Giving Biden Bad Advice on Inflation

To spare the economy from the pain of further interest rate hikes, the President should aggressively pursue anticompetitive conduct by companies in...

Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Reply to Hovenkamp and Shapiro

The Federal Trade Commission’s now-abandoned 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines were not some ideal economic document that the FTC foolishly disregarded; rather, they...

Beefing Up Merger Enforcement by Banning Merger Remedies

The unraveling of the T-Mobile/Sprint remedy continues a trend of failed merger consent decrees. One solution, proposed by two antitrust scholars, is...

Rep. Cicilline’s Nondiscrimination Bill Would Offer a Lifeline to Independent App Developers

Contrary to the naysayers, the American Choice and Innovation Online Act won’t result in naked iPhones or iPhones cluttered with hundreds of...

Fixing a Broken Antitrust Regime

In her new book Antitrust, Senator Amy Klobuchar explains the origins of US antitrust law, diagnoses how the nation got derailed from...

Congress Is Leaning Towards a Big Tech Breakup

The dominant platforms have proven themselves to be ungovernable. Behavioral remedies, especially those that require continuous oversight, might be pushed aside. The...

There Are Lots of Competition Problems on the Internet. Parler’s Takedown Is Not One of Them.

Parler’s antitrust case against Amazon is doomed, and there is no basis for Congress to impose any special duties on Amazon to...

Facebook Could Be Heading Towards a Breakup

Assuming Facebook’s acquisitions can be shown to have eliminated emerging rivals, reversing those acquisitions via divestiture—“the most important of antitrust remedies”—is the...

The Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Has Charted a Course for President-Elect Biden: He Should Follow It

Real antitrust reform of the kind offered by the Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee is needed to assist enforcers in precisely the types of...

Antitrust as Economic Stimulus

By attacking power imbalances, competition policy can steer income to workers and independent merchants who are more inclined to spend than monopoly...

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The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.

The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.

The Chicago Boys and the Chilean Neoliberal Project

In a new book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Sebastian Edwards details the history of neoliberalism in Chile over the past seventy years. The Chicago Boys—a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago through the U.S. State Department’s “Chile Project”—played a central role in neoliberalism’s ascent during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. What follows is an excerpt from the book on University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1975 visit to Chile to meet with Pinochet and business leaders.

Creating a Modern Antitrust Welfare Standard that Integrates Post-Chicago and Neo-Brandeisian Goals

Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard  is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.

Getting Partisans To Listen to One Another Can Reduce Political Polarization

In new research, Guglielmo Briscese and Michèle Belot find that reminding Americans of shared values can open lines of communication and help reduce political polarization.

The State of The Debate on U.S. Antitrust and Competition

This year’s Stigler Center conference on antitrust and competition invited scholars to propose alternatives to the consumer welfare standard.