antitrust and competition

Dennis Carlton: The Draft Merger Guidelines Demote Economics To Justify Aggressive Antitrust Enforcement

Dennis Carlton provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Steven Salop: Burdens of Proof and Presumptions in the Merger Guidelines

Steven Salop provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Eric Posner: The Role of Consumer Welfare in Merger Enforcement

Eric Posner provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Antitrust Enforcement Increases Economic Activity

Simcha Barkai describes the results of new research on the impact of antitrust on U.S. economic activity with co-authors Tania Babina, Jessica Jeffers, Ezra Karger, and Ekaterina Volkova. Enforcement, they find, increases the level of economic activity.

Eleanor Fox: Tackling the Critics of the Draft Merger Guidelines

Eleanor Fox provides her round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Carl Shapiro: How Would These Draft Guidelines Work in Practice?

Carl Shapiro provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Herbert Hovenkamp: Distinguishing Harms from Benefits in the 2023 Merger Guidelines

Herb Hovenkamp provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

Bilal Sayyed: The Draft Merger Guidelines Abandon the Persuasiveness of their Predecessors

Bilal Sayyed provides his round-one comments on the draft Merger Guidelines. To read more from the ProMarket Merger Guidelines Symposium, please...

Modernizing the IRS Presents an Opportunity To Level the Economic Playing Field

Corporate America makes sport of gaming the tax authorities, especially after decades of budget cuts to the IRS. What dominant corporations make by hiring expensive tax and lobby teams to distort the rules in their favor, smaller businesses, workers, and the general public are forced to cover with higher taxes and worsened services. Competition shouldn’t hinge on who has more pull over the tax rules and how they’re enforced. Decisions made over the next year to modernize the IRS present a historic opportunity to shape a less entrenched and more competitive economy, writes Niko Lusiani.

Family Ties and the Boundaries of the Firm in Antitrust Enforcement

In new research, Mariana Pargendler, Maria Luiza Mesquita, and Lucas Víspico study how antitrust authorities in the Global South have used family ties to define business enterprises and analyze mergers and acquisitions for possibly anticompetitive behavior.

LATEST NEWS

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.