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Big Tech Calls for Agency Heads To Recuse Are a Groundless and Cynical Strategy To Obstruct Enforcement

Big Tech’s efforts to push Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter to recuse themselves from participating in lawsuits against the companies due to prior work have no legal basis and are naked efforts to weaken agency enforcement, writes Laurence Tribe.

The Needless Desertion of Robinson-Patman

ProMarket is kicking-off a discussion of the Robinson-Patman Act (RPA), an antitrust law preventing price discrimination that hasn't been enforced in decades....

Private Labels in Online Marketplaces

On their store shelves, Walmart has its own products under the "Great Value” brand, and Tesco has its own “Everyday Value” products....

Bolsonaro’s reelection may become a setback for ESG in Brazil

Social pressures, market forces and elected leaders influence corporate decisions on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Journalist Stephanie Tondo examines the...

Big Tech ‘Self-Preferencing’ Bills May Hurt—Not Help— Antitrust Reform

A new paper from Erik Hovenkamp outlines pitfalls contained in newly proposed antitrust reform legislation that targets Big Tech companies. He proposes...

Rep. Ken Buck on the Need for Antitrust Reform: “Big Corporate America Scares People”

In an interview with ProMarket, Republican congressman Ken Buck explains why antitrust enforcement is so crucial to the US economy and American democracy,...

How to Prevent Big Tech From Hindering Pathbreaking Innovation in the Metaverse

The transition to the metaverse presents a technological paradigm shift akin to the shift from desktop computers to smartphones, but today’s dominant...

Tech Platforms and the Antitrust Duty to Deal

Why is there a widespread view that existing American antitrust law is ill-equipped to address dominant platforms that exclude or discriminate against...

What’s Behind Amazon’s Demand that FTC Chair Lina Khan Recuse Herself?

Amazon’s attempt to get Khan to recuse herself from any antitrust investigation into the company is not the first time that a...

The Profit Paradox: A New Approach to Competition and Market Power

Jan Eeckhout’s recent book The Profit Paradox is a serious attempt to explain rising market power and its implications to a wider...

LATEST NEWS

Uninhibited Campaign Donations Risks Creating Oligarchy

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Did the Meme Stock Revolution Actually Change Anything?

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition

Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.