Media Capture
The Present and Future of Journalism: How the News Media Lost Its Purpose
At a time of information overabundance, journalism has lost its purpose. Newspapers, traditionally the keepers of journalistic flame, are going away. What...
Announcing the Participants in the Fall 2021 Stigler Center Journalists in Residence Program
This month, the Stigler Center will welcome eight world-class journalists from the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, Romania, Ukraine, Slovenia, and the United...
“This Isn’t the Kind of Journalism That Serves Democracy Best”: How Place and Privilege Came to Define American News
In an interview with ProMarket, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Nikki Usher discusses how news in the US came to be...
Why Are Google and Facebook Now Okay with Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code?
A week of commercial deals and government negotiations has resulted in a series of amendments to the legislation aimed at making Google...
Australia’s News Media and Digital Platforms Bargaining Code is Great Politics But Questionable Economics
If the Australian government wants to subsidize high-quality journalism then it should, well, subsidize high-quality journalism. The new proposed ACCC code would...
The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: How Increases in Fox News Viewership Reduced Compliance With Social Distancing Guidelines
Using zip-code level data on Fox News viewership and individual cellphone movement data, a recent study finds that increasing the local viewership...
The Best Political Economy Books of 2019
A history of American antimonopoly, the case against Big Tech, and how Europe got better than the US at free markets: here are (in no...
Why Michael Bloomberg’s Run for President Creates an Unprecedented Media Problem
The first effect of Michael Bloomberg’s campaign and of his conflicts of interest is to reduce the 2020 candidates’ accountability: one of the world's...
How Israel's Antimonopolists Helped Take Down Benjamin Netanyahu
The corruption exposed by Israeli antimonopolists has been a key driver of Benjamin Netanyahu's current political woes.
If you pay any attention to the weird...
Vertical Media Mergers Are a Serious Threat to Freedom of Speech
Antitrust regulators should stop mergers where a firm owning the means of transmission acquires a provider of content. The people that own the pipes...
LATEST NEWS
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Book Excerpts
The Chicago Boys and the Chilean Neoliberal Project
In a new book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Sebastian Edwards details the history of neoliberalism in Chile over the past seventy years. The Chicago Boys—a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago through the U.S. State Department’s “Chile Project”—played a central role in neoliberalism’s ascent during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. What follows is an excerpt from the book on University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1975 visit to Chile to meet with Pinochet and business leaders.
Antitrust and Competition
Creating a Modern Antitrust Welfare Standard that Integrates Post-Chicago and Neo-Brandeisian Goals
Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.
Democracy
Getting Partisans To Listen to One Another Can Reduce Political Polarization
In new research, Guglielmo Briscese and Michèle Belot find that reminding Americans of shared values can open lines of communication and help reduce political polarization.