European Commission

Self-Favoring in the Digital Economy and the Role of Antitrust

At the moment, the strategy of the major tech platforms seems to be to deny any bias and malicious self-favoring. The facts,...

How the European Commission Lost Its Tax Battle Against Ireland and Apple

Last month’s decision by Europe’s General Court to reject the European Commission’s attempt to recover €13 billion in back taxes from Apple...

The EU’s Attempt at Updating Antitrust Market Definition for the Digital Age

The rise of digital platforms has upended markets and the very act of market definition—the basic unit of antitrust analysis. With the...

Regulators Turn Their Attention Towards Apple’s Exploitation of App Developers. Now What?

Congress could level the playing field for independent app developers by looking to regulatory templates in music.

At the Heart of the European Commission’s Investigations of Apple Is a Basic Question: How Should Apple Make Money?

Just like Spotify, Apple has amassed an installed base of users. Spotify sells its users to advertisers while Apple sells its users...

"The Lack of Competition Has Deprived American Workers of $1.25 Trillion of Income"

French economist Thomas Philippon, author of the recent The Great Reversal, explains how Europe got to be better at free markets than the US and how...

Did Facebook and Google “Blackmail” EU Experts to Avoid Discussing Their Market Power?

A new report by the journalist network Investigate Europe claims representatives of Facebook and Google pressured members of an EU working group on fake...

Market Concentration, Regulation, and Europe´s Quest for a New Industrial Policy

Weakening competition policy in Europe risks creating monopolies rather than industrial champions. An interventionist style of industrial policy, one that revolves around picking winners, has...

On the Economics of the Google Android Case

A general challenge facing competition authorities in the digital era is learning how to apply the traditional tools of competition policy in multi-sided platform...

The European Commission Picks a Fight with Google Android over Business Models

UChicago Law’s Randy Picker puzzles over the rationale behind last week’s multibillion-euro fine on Google by the European Commission. While the decision makes a...

LATEST NEWS

Do Wealth Taxes Significantly Curb Wealth Inequality?

Politicians and governments in the United States and elsewhere have recently proposed or implemented wealth taxes to supplement revenue and reduce wealth inequality. In a new study, Samira Marti, Isabel Z. Martínez, and Florian Scheuer show how decreases in wealth taxes led to increases in wealth inequality in Switzerland, though they find that these decreases alone are not enough to explain the magnitude of widening disparities.

Merged Firms Offer Less Product Variety

In new research, Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Christopher Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu find that mergers and acquisitions often lead to the merged firm offering less product variety than when the two firms operated pre-merger.

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.

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.