Mergers
Did the Supreme Court Fix “Brown Shoe”?
The Supreme Court’s 1962 Brown Shoe decision, which found a merger to be anticompetitive even though it would have reduced prices for...
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...
Why the Antitrust Agencies Should Consider Prior Bad Acts in Merger Review
As the federal antitrust agencies consider revising the merger guidelines, they should add consideration of the merging parties’ previous bad acts, write...
A New Merger Tool Protects Consumers from Limits of the Cournot Effect
The widely accepted Cournot effect assumes that the merger of complementary firms benefits downstream firms and consumers (in addition to the merged...
Antitrust Deregulation is Undermining Innovation
A 2000 amendment to the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act made it easier for firms to merge without notifying US antitrust authorities. In new research,...
How the Wrong Presumptions Led to the Wrong Conclusions in the United/Change Healthcare Merger
On Sept. 19, a federal judge approved UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of Change Healthcare over the concerns of the U.S. Department of Justice....
When Rhetoric Confronts Economic Reality: Unsupported Efficiency Claims and Unenforceable Promises Cannot Save the Book Publishers Deal
In trying to get their merger approved, Penguin and Simon & Schuster claimed massive, but unverified cost savings. They also have promised...
Antitrust and the FTC: Franchise Restraints on Worker Mobility
As currently formulated, antitrust’s rule of reason approach is not the best tool to deal with vertical noncompete agreements that limit worker...
The FTC Was Correct to Withdraw the Vertical Merger Guidelines
The 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines, now withdrawn by the FTC, did not represent sound merger policy, argues Steven Salop; rather, they were...
Missing the Forest for the Trees: A Reply to Hovenkamp and Shapiro
The Federal Trade Commission’s now-abandoned 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines were not some ideal economic document that the FTC foolishly disregarded; rather, they...
LATEST NEWS
Antitrust and Competition
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...
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.
