John G. Matsusaka
John G. Matsusaka is the Charles F. Sexton Chair in American Enterprise in the Marshall School of Business, Gould School of Law, and Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on political economy and corporate government, in particular on direct democracy and representation. He teaches classes on corporate finance, corporate governance, political economy, and microeconomics. His research has been published in leading journals in economics, finance, political science, and law, and he is the author of two books, most recently, Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Challenge of Population (2020).
News
Voters Still Believe Politics is About the Common Good, Not Just Rent-Seeking
Do voters still believe that politics can be a source for common-good policies and not just partisan bickering and rent-seeking? With political...
News
A Challenge for Stakeholder Capitalism: Solving the Paradoxes of Voting
If corporations are to maximize shareholder welfare, managers need to discover what shareholders value; political theory shows how difficult this can be.
Commentary
How to Get Police Reform Done? Use Direct Democracy
Instead of just imploring their representatives to fix things, Americans can use the tools of direct democracy to take charge and promote...
ESG & Corporate Governance
Turning Corporations into Democracies
The problem with encouraging firms to maximize shareholder welfare is how to prevent managers and special interests from diverting corporate resources in the name of shareholder...
ESG & Corporate Governance
Does Empowering Shareholders Also Empower Special Interests?
The merits of increasing shareholder power are less obvious than reforms that increase companies' exposure to pressure from activist shareholders, since increasing shareholder power tends to...
ESG & Corporate Governance
Enhancing Competition? The Role of Governance in Increasing Exposure to Competition
Contemporary corporate governance reform has been a mixed bag: reforms that increase a company’s exposure to competition through the control market have been helpful,...
Latest news
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Book Excerpts
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Democracy
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
The Impact of Algorithms on Competition and Competition Law
Antonio Capobianco, the deputy head of the OECD Competition Division and one of the authors of the 2023 OECD report on algorithmic competition and collusion, explains the risks that algorithms and artificial intelligence pose to competition and how regulators can approach the changing competition paradigm.
