Commentary

Steve Salop explores the anticompetitive innovation behind weight-loss giant Novo Nordisk’s offer to acquire Metsera. Novo’s proposed contract presents a new tactic by which firms with market power can preclude rival mergers that will lead to procompetitive entry.

Richard Messick summarizes the output of last April’s Global Capitalism, Trust, and Accountability Conference, co-sponsored by the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Participants explored the mechanisms of international corruption and how citizens, states, and the international community can address them.

The Google Search monopoly case focused on how Google’s agreements with Apple to set Google Search as the exclusive default search engine on Apple’s mobile devices allowed Google to solidify its monopoly in internet search. However, a less-explored dimension of these agreements is how they likewise fortified Apple’s monopoly power in the smartphone market, writes Steven C. Salop.

Ariel Ezrachi warns about the rising trend of political instrumentalization of antitrust and competition enforcement and its consequences.

Corporate decarbonization policy has stagnated under ideological divisions. Arguing that anthropogenic emissions are driven by customer preferences and that such preferences can shift with improved information, Karthik Ramanna advocates for a new approach: an economy-wide system of reliable and comparable accounts of the embedded emissions in products to allow customers (and investors) to make more-informed decisions aligned with underlying preferences. In part II of his two-part series (read part I here), Ramanna explores the principles of an accounting methodology to provide better greenhouse gas emissions data to business customers and consumers and the reasons why, based on historical precedent, such a system is readily adoptable and likely to prove effective. 

Corporate decarbonization policy has stagnated under ideological divisions. Arguing that anthropogenic emissions are driven by customer preferences and that such preferences can shift with improved information, Karthik Ramanna advocates for a new approach: an economy-wide system of reliable and comparable accounts of the embedded emissions in products to allow customers (and investors) to make better-informed decisions aligned with underlying preferences. In the first of two articles, Ramanna discusses why top-down regulatory approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have failed to generate decarbonization at meaningful scales and the virtues of a pro-market approach to incentivizing and enabling greener corporate and consumer behavior.

Diana L. Moss reviews the increasing politicization of antitrust and regulation in the United States and what avenues are available to resist the corruption of due process and usurpation of the rule of law.

Corporate crimes like fraud continue unabated in the United States. Jennifer Taub defines a chief reason as “accountability theater,” or the propensity of government prosecutors to pursue out-of-court civil settlements rather than criminal trials that, though they might lose them, would publicize the extent of corporate misconduct and better deter future abuse.

States are beginning to impose idiosyncratic rules on artificial intelligence chatbots and other offerings in response to harms to consumers. Rather than create a...

Elizabeth Pollman reviews barriers for holding corporations and their fiduciaries accountable under corporate and securities law.