The Digital Economy

User Hesitancy Increases Online Platforms’ Incumbency Advantage

“Incumbency advantage” among Big Tech platforms recognizes that network effects prevent users from leaving established platforms for emerging competitors. Gary Biglaiser, Jacques...

Twitter’s Corporate Leaders Pushed their Stakeholders under the (Musk) Bus

In a new study, we examine whether, in negotiating the sale to Elon Musk, Twitter’s corporate leaders took into account the commitments...

The Wicked Problem Embodied by The Twitter Files

In response to a recent ProMarket post about the Twitter Files, professor Tom Ginsburg points out that the toughest question lies in...

How Should the Law Tackle Rapidly Evolving Financial Technologies?

The last half-century has witnessed an explosion of technology changing how the financial landscape functions for customers and new and legacy banking...

Too Many Economists Are Using a Flawed Theory To Defend Dominant Platforms’ Self-Preferencing Practices

Congress is currently considering two major bills that would regulate “self-preferencing” and related conduct by dominant digital platforms. Criticism of these bills...

The Economics of Content Moderation on Social Media

Social media platforms have moderated user-generated content since their inception. Economics helps us understand why they do it and how to regulate...

The Tech Barons’ Ideological Platter

Far from their self-promoted image as the world’s most innovative companies, the major tech platforms stifle plenty of innovation and invest in...

How to Design Data Protection Laws That Actually Work 

More and more countries are passing data protection laws, yet empirical studies show that these laws rarely deliver on their promises. A...

The Critiques Against the American Innovation and Choice Online Act Miss the Mark

In an opinion piece, Yelp’s general counsel Aaron Schur argues that recent criticisms against the bill, which the Senate is expected to...

Two New Papers Suggest Antitrust Law is Not Equipped to Address Personalized Pricing and Algorithmic Cartels

Two recent articles by Michal Gal and Ramsi Woodcock look at pricing algorithms and consumer harm. Both identify potential nightmare scenarios and...

Latest news

Creation over Time in Copyright and Patent

On May 18, the United States Supreme Court decided two intellectual property cases with two seemingly different results. A closer look, however, reveals a complimentary concern with the monopolistic power of first movers and how the legal system should enable innovation from second movers over time, writes Randy Picker.

ESG Standards’ Good, Bad and Ugly

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted a virtual event discussing the standards, metrics and disclosures of investments focused on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. The following is a transcript of the event.

Reregulate.

Lee Hepner and William J. McGee respond to Clifford Winston’s ProMarket piece asserting that further deregulation of the airline industry would resolve problems in the industry. Instead, the authors claim a return to regulation would produce better results for travelers.

A World With Far Fewer Mergers

Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

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.