markups

The Cost of America’s Oligopoly Problem

An innovative new study finds substantial, increasing deadweight losses resulting from oligopolistic behavior and points to the important role that startup acquisitions—particularly by large...

Global Declining Competition

Studies of the evolution of market power since 2000 have focused mostly on publicly traded US firms. This column introduces a new global study...

What Current Research (Still) Gets Wrong about Market Power

Two much-discussed new studies argue that market power is on the rise not only in the United States, but also around the world. Here,...

70 Years of US Corporate Profits

A new Stigler Center working paper shows that after decades of decline, profits started increasing in the early 1980s. Financial profit is ostensibly the...

Factorless Income and Some Skepticism on the Case for Rising Markups

If imputed payments to labor and capital don’t add up to GDP, what should be done with the residual? New research from Chicago Booth...

LATEST NEWS

A World With Far Fewer Mergers

Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.

The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.