antitrust and competition

Marios Constantine Iacovides discusses his and Konstantinos Stylianou’s empirical investigations into how the goals of competition policy have evolved over time. They find that a multitude of goals have always been present in judicial and regulatory decisions, but the emphasis on certain goals has vacillated in response to the concerns of the time. Contemporary concerns about the health of democracy suggest a revival of ordoliberalism and protection of the competitive process.

Regulators worldwide are debating how to rein in Big Tech's dominance over app distribution. Tiffany Tsai and Chuyue Tian explore how Apple’s clash with China’s WeChat complicates standard assumptions about platform competition and what it might mean for the next wave of antitrust enforcement.

Herbert Hovenkamp writes that the court presiding over the Google Ad Tech case gave the government an important win. However, by relying on the per se tying rule instead of rule of reason, the court perpetuated a flawed court precedent that can preclude serious market analysis for competitive harms.

The Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta for monopolizing personal social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp serves as a warning of allowing Big Tech companies to acquire nascent competitors in the artificial intelligence market through quasi-mergers that dodge government scrutiny. Based on new research, Alexandros Kazimirov argues that antitrust agencies can look at a combination of circumstantial evidence, including market product proximity, price premiums and product discontinuation, to help adjust their approach to keep AI markets contestable, rather than trying to restore contestability ten years from now.

In new research, Xuelin Li, Sijie Wang, Jiajie Xu, and Xiang Zheng find that the involvement of specialized venture capital firms influences a biotech startup’s drug portfolio by focusing research and development on fewer products.

A new field experiment sheds light on why Google continues to dominate the search engine market despite regulatory interventions and the availability of alternatives. The authors find that while Google offers higher quality, consumer overestimation of this advantage—along with inattention and default effects—helps entrench its market power and limits the effectiveness of proposed antitrust remedies.

The following is the second part to the transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s keynote at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and...

The following is a transcript of Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson's Keynote Address at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference. A transcript of Ferguson's accompanying interview with University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, and the subsequent audience Q&A, will be published next week.

Andrey Mir writes that antitrust scholarship and enforcement seeking to break up platform monopolies overlook the benefits that these platforms provide because they are monopolies. He says the community must keep this in mind as it seeks to alleviate harms that any monopoly incurs to the economy.

The concentration of news media has spurred concerns about their ability to protect the marketplace of ideas integral to the functioning of democracy. Based on new research, Marcel Garz and Mart Ots discuss why media consolidation may not lead to lower journalistic quality but still affects society through a decline in local news and original content.