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Call for Papers for 2027 Stigler Center Conference: Will AI Kill Markets (and Democracy)?

The Stigler Center is putting out a call for papers for its 2027 annual conference. The theme of this year's conference will be the impact of artificial intelligence on markets and democracy. Please see here for more information. "The best argument in favor of both markets and democracies is that each system can aggregate the knowledge and preferences of millions of people more effectively than any centralized planner. But that argument traditionally assumed that the planner would be human. What...

COMMENTARY

Merger Review Should Test for Labor Market Mavericks

Shishene Jing
Although merger review now acknowledges potential harms to labor markets, the analytical tools remain underdeveloped. Shishene Jing proposes identifying “labor market mavericks” as companies essential to maintaining competition among employers and preventing mergers that could reduce wages and other worker benefits.

RESEARCH

Wealth Taxes Can Make Capital Markets More Efficient

Sergio Ocampo, Guttorm Schjelderup and Floris Zoutman
Wealth taxes can make capital markets more efficient when they are optimally combined with lower capital gains taxes, argue Sergio Ocampo, Guttorm Schjelderup, and Floris Zoutman in new research.
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Antitrust and Competition

Mineral Concentration Jeopardizes America’s AI Industry

Piyush Akimitsu
The discussion about concentration in artificial intelligence markets focuses on the least concentrated layer, the models. The chokepoint that actually threatens AI is the production of refined minerals that go into chips, data centers, and electricity production, writes Piyush Akimitsu.   
Antitrust and Competition

Competition Law Must Protect the Citizen, Too

Walid Chaiehloudj
Walid Chaiehloudj argues that when a scientifically substantiated large but uncertain risk, like environmental damage, conflicts with standard competition analysis, competition authorities need to defer to a precautionary citizen-consumer standard that takes into consideration the risks of that harm.
Research

Can Regulation Prevent Collusion Against Environmental Standards?

Jorge Alé-Chilet
In recent research, Jorge Alé-Chilet, Cuicui Chen, Jing Li, and Mathias Reynaert find that when faced with environmental regulations, collusion among German car manufacturers reduced their expected non-compliance fines and significantly increased consumer and producer surplus. At the same time, social welfare decreased by billions of euros because of increased pollution.
Antitrust and Competition

The Prescription for Better Health Insurance? Competition.

Amanda Starc and Martin Gaynor
Anticompetitive behavior, such as consolidation, in the health-insurance industry has allowed a small group of insurers to dominate the market. One of the main drivers of this behavior is “adverse selection,” where individuals know more about how sick they are than insurance companies do. To mitigate the risk of paying out more claims than they can cover, insurers often raise their premiums. Kellogg’s Amanda Starc and her colleague argue that, to create a truly healthy health-insurance marketplace, regulators and policymakers need a framework for rethinking the complex interactions between adverse selection and regulatory guardrails.
Regulation

Economic Bubbles Can Be Constructive

Jared Bernstein, Aneil Kovvali and Jeffery Zhang
News media circulates with warnings about speculative bubbles in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, but history shows that not all bubbles are bad for the economy, and some may even aid long-term growth. In new research, Jared Bernstein, Aneil Kovvali and Jeffery Y. Zhang distinguish between constructive and destructive bubbles and suggest how the government and financial institutions can limit the consequences of the latter.
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READING LISTS

Health Care

Americans spend significantly more on health care than any other country. Why? Answers to this question range from hospital monopolies to perverse incentives to opaque pricing to medical licensing to pharmaceutical firms abusing IP practices to “creeping consolidation.” Why is the US health care system so broken? And what can antirust do about it? Catch-up on our coverage of antitrust and the US health care system.

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Antitrust and Competition

Antitrust as a Cure for the Private Equity Disease

Theodosia Stavroulaki
The United States healthcare system has experienced an expansion of private equity ownership. In new research, Theodosia Stavroulaki argues that private equity acquisitions risk harming healthcare by increasing prices, reducing quality of care, limiting access to care, and hurting the labor force.
Commentary

Pharma’s AI Boom Has Bet on the Wrong Bottleneck

Michael Santoro
Investors have poured billions into using artificial intelligence to discover new drugs, and 2026 is the first real test of whether AI-designed medicines actually helps patients. The boom has genuinely transformed the search for molecules — but that was never the costly, failure-prone part of making a medicine, and there AI has so far had little to add. Capital, and the public subsidies have not yet priced the difference, writes Michael A. Santoro.
Antitrust and Competition

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager Settlements Are a Novel Advance for the FTC and Competition Enforcement

Fiona Scott Morton and Mariah Smith
In February, the Federal Trade Commission settled with pharmaceutical benefits manager (PBM) Express Scripts. The FTC had sued Express Scripts and two other large PBMs under the long dormant Section 5 of the FTC Act, which targets “unfair methods of competition.” The settlement suggests that the FTC may succeed in addressing the convoluted contracts between PBMs, drug manufacturers, health insurers, and employers that drive up drug prices for Americans. It also opens unchartered territory for antitrust enforcement and the limits of Section 5, argue Fiona Scott Morton and Mariah Smith.
Health Care

How Competition Has Increased Fraud in Medicare’s DME Program

Renuka Diwan, Paul Eliason, Riley League, Ryan C. McDevitt and James W. Roberts
In new research, Renuka Diwan, Paul Eliason, Riley League, Ryan C. McDevitt, James W. Roberts, and Jetson Leder-Luis investigate how Medicare’s shift to a competitive bidding system to reduce prices has inadvertently shifted market share to fraudulent suppliers.

George J. Stigler, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982 “for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets, and causes and effects of public regulation.” His research upended the idea that government regulation was effective at correcting private-market failures. Stigler introduced the idea of regulatory capture, in which regulators could be dominated by special interests. These regulators would work for the benefit of large, monied organizations rather than the public good. Catch up on ProMarket's coverage of his legacy.

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Antitrust and Competition

When Should Corporate Lobbying Trigger EU Competition Scrutiny? 

Francisco Beneke
In new research, Francisco E. Beneke Avila proposes a multifactor test to distinguish between the legitimate exercise of the right to lobbying and efforts to capture areas of public policy. He argues that the latter is an abuse of the firm’s political rights that can justify the intervention of EU competition authorities when corporate political activity leads to a lessening of competition. 
Commentary

AI Exposes Flaws in Copyright’s Focus on Transformativeness in Fair Use

Shishene Jing
Shishene Jing argues that the fair use doctrine's central question—whether a use is sufficiently transformative to avoid licensing requirements—breaks down when applied to AI. Transformativeness worked as a test because transformative uses rarely competed financially with the originals. AI training severs that relationship, as it is both the most transformative use of copyrighted material and the use best equipped to displace their markets.
Cultural Economics

After Affirmative Action Ends, Minority- and Women-Owned Contractors Face an Uphill Battle

Benjamin Rosa
In new research, Benjamin Rosa finds that when states ban affirmative action, minority- and women-run businesses become smaller than other contractors and are less likely to enter the market, but are no more likely to close their businesses entirely. 
Antitrust and Competition

Do Americans Want To Break Up Big Firms?

Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Jeffrey Yusof
In new research, Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Jeffrey Yusof study what drives Americans’ support for antitrust enforcement. They find that information about traditional consumer welfare harms, such as higher prices or less choice, has the largest and most durable impact.

American Companies Expect Their Customers To Stay Much Longer. That May Be Making the Economy Less Competitive

Christopher Stewart
In new research, Li Azinovic-Yang, John D. Kepler, Ava E. Speros, and Christopher R. Stewart find that over the last two decades, companies in the United States have grown to expect customer relationships to last longer, mostly due to higher costs associated with switching to competitors’ products. Over the long term, this lock-in reduces competition and consumer welfare.

Domestic Bond Investors Can be a Powerful Constraint on Far-Right Populists

Alison Johnston and Juliet Johnson
The rise of the far right has been a defining feature of political systems in developed democracies over the past two decades. In recent research, Alison Johnston and Juliet Johnson demonstrate that domestic bond investors have become an important constraint on populist governments and their access to capital. 

Google’s Search Monopoly Money Will Let It Purchase the AI Market

Asad Ramzanali and Joel Thayer
Google built and maintains its AI leadership from cash, compute, and data accumulated illegally from its monopoly in internet search. Its control over internet search, advertisement, mobile phone operating systems, and cloud computing continues to give it an advantage in AI that its competitors lack. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit must consider this entrenched and vertically integrated market position when it revisits the lower court’s lax remedies, write Asad Ramzanali and Joel Thayer.

COLUMNS

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The publication of the Stigler Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

ProMarket is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visit ProMarket Policy.