Jeff Bezos

“I Wanted to Call People’s Attention to the Extent of Amazon’s Takeover of Washington”

In an interview with ProMarket, author and ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis discusses the rise of Amazon and regional inequality, the role of...

Top 10 Admissions from Tech CEOs Secured at the Antitrust Hearing

This week’s Congressional hearing produced evidence of anticompetitive conduct that state attorneys general and private enforcers can use to pursue the dominant...

What Congress Should Ask Big Tech CEOs

This week, the House Committee on the Judiciary will hold a hearing on digital platforms and market power, during which members will get...

Covid-19 and Amazon’s Future: a Webinar With Stacy Mitchell, Steven Kaplan, and Jacob Schlesinger

As part of the Stigler Center’s Political Economy of Covid-19 Series of online programming, which explores the economic and political implications of...

Zoom, Netflix, Slack: Amazon Is Behind All the Services We Use to Work From Home (and That’s a Problem)

The new normal for millions of people represents a near-total dependence on Amazon’s cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and places a substantial portion...

What Is the Meaning of Wealth?

Who's richer, a person who enjoys the comfort of modern services and technologies, or the ancient kings of a millennia ago? Comparing wealth over...

How Amazon's Pricing Policies Squeeze Sellers and Result in Higher Prices for Consumers

Amazon's price matching policies, which were meant to ensure its dominant position, diminished the ability of brands to control how their products are distributed...

The News Media’s Business Model of Extortion

The Jeff Bezos vs. The National Enquirer scandal highlights the role that extortion may play in the business model of some news outlets.  Jeff Bezos’s...

LATEST NEWS

Tim Wu Responds to Letter by Former Agency Chief Economists

Former special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy Tim Wu responds to the November 27 letter signed by former chief economists at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department Antitrust Division calling for a separation of the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines.

Can the Public Moderate Social Media?

ProMarket student editor Surya Gowda reviews the arguments made by Paul Gowder in his new book, The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms.

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.