antitrust

The Reasonable Competitive Conduct Standard for Antitrust

The Stigler Center’s 2023 Antitrust and Competition conference seeks to answer the question: what lays beyond the consumer welfare standard? In advance...

Chart of the Week: Concentration in Ticket-Selling Market Produces Costly Outcomes

Economists overwhelmingly agree that the lack of competition in the market for ticket-selling intermediaries leads to attendees paying more, according to a...

Antitrust Enforcement, Inflation and Corporate Greed: What do we know?

At a recent Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) event, panelists, including the Stigler Center's own Luigi Zingales, reflected on the roles...

2023 Antitrust and Competition Conference: Call for Papers

The Stigler Center is inviting submissions of short academic articles (up to 3000 words) focused on the development of a legal/economic...

Five New Pieces You Should Read from Chicago Booth Review

Chicago Booth Review recently published its fall issue covering a variety of new research. We suggest five articles from the issue on...

How to Converge the US and European Antitrust Approaches Toward Big Tech

The growing consensus that Big Tech platforms need to be restrained creates a unique opportunity for international cooperation among antitrust enforcers. The...

The Corruption of Consumer Welfare

The consumer welfare standard is used in modern antitrust enforcement to evaluate a merger between two firms. However, its original definition was...

New Study Warns Antitrust Inaction May Lead To Acceptable Collusion for Public Policy Considerations

The modernization of EU antitrust laws muddied the water with regard to the ways that antitrust authorities and courts should handle situations...

How Should Antitrust Deal With Facebook? A Stigler Center Panel Investigates

Panelists at the Stigler Center’s recent antitrust conference look at the antitrust case against Facebook and discuss potential theories of harm, as...

Larry Summers Cautions Antitrust Regulators Against Broad-Brush Policy

In a wide-ranging interview with ProMarket, Summers expands on recent criticism of top antitrust enforcement officials, efforts to stymie Big Tech, monopsony,...

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.