News

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted its annual antitrust and competition conference in late April. The following is a transcript of the Judges Frank Easterbrook and Diane Wood's keynote conversation with Stigler Center Fellow Filippo Lancieri.

Kurt Davis Jr. argues that the U.S. Congress should consider switching from a federal debt ceiling as a nominal value to one fixed as a percentage of GDP. This debt ceiling should, on the one hand, be high enough that the government cannot reasonably cross it, but punitive enough that it disincentivizes profligate spending. This will save the U.S. from the annual political theater that occurs around debt ceiling talks and focus the discussion on the federal budget (and potentially taking revenue and spending decisions to actually control the deficit).

Most mergers in industries with only a handful of competitors are anticompetitive, so why don’t we block them? The fix is to use a structural presumption to lower the burden for regulators.

The second Affiliate Fellows cohort at the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth is a multidisciplinary group of economists, business scholars, lawyers, and political scientists.

Why ban competitive offers in the online world when they’re allowed offline? Big tech wants plain vanilla broadband pricing because it forecloses platform competition.

Daryl Lim explains that while there is some evidence that pricing algorithms facilitate collusion, there are reasons to be skeptical of their effectiveness. Lim advocates for compliance by design: firms should create algorithms that don’t collude on price, comply with reporting their algorithms transparently, and know that they will be held responsible for the actions the algorithm takes.

Does investing in information technology (IT) enable firms to “scale without mass” and increase their market share? In a new paper, Erik Brynjolfsson, Wang Jin, and Xiupeng Wang examine how IT affects firm size, market concentration, and the labor share of revenue.

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted its annual antitrust and competition conference in late April. The following is a transcript of Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart's interview with ProMarket Managing Editor Brooke Fox.

New research indicates that FinTech lending has not been as ‘disruptive’ in risk-based pricing as claimed. While FinTech has provided increased loan access to some individuals, reliance on traditional credit scoring and spillovers from banking regulations leads to mispricing and cross-subsidization of borrowers. The authors suggest alternatives to allocate capital efficiently and improve financial inclusion.

Grail and its competitors are developing tests which will save perhaps millions of lives. They will detect many different types of cancer very early—if they ever exist. All these tests need Illumina’s instruments. The FTC, reversing an administrative law judge, said Illumina could not buy Grail. If it did, the FTC said, it would not let Grail’s competitors use its instruments. Illumina has appealed, saying, among other things, that since the tests do not exist there is, for antitrust purposes, currently no market.  Yet while the tests may or may not exist in the future the Fifth Circuit has to decide this case now.