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How To Handle Big Tech Acquisitions Under Uncertainty

The Federal Trade Commission recently failed to stop Meta’s acquisition of virtual reality company Within, while the Department of Justice is now...

Meta-Within Should Be Viewed in the Context of Meta’s Broader Efforts To Monopolize Social Networking

A California court recently denied the FTC’s motion to block the Meta-Within merger. Brandon Nye writes that the FTC could have expanded...

An Excessive Evidentiary Burden Sunk the FTC’s Case Against the Meta/Within Merger

In early February, a district court judge rejected the FTC’s preliminary injunction suit to block Meta’s purchase of Within, a developer of...

How Should Antitrust Deal With Facebook? A Stigler Center Panel Investigates

Panelists at the Stigler Center’s recent antitrust conference look at the antitrust case against Facebook and discuss potential theories of harm, as...

How to Prevent Big Tech From Hindering Pathbreaking Innovation in the Metaverse

The transition to the metaverse presents a technological paradigm shift akin to the shift from desktop computers to smartphones, but today’s dominant...

Facebook’s Responses to Criticism Sound Too Good to Be True

The Facebook Papers show how Facebook’s relentlessly positive and defiant PR messaging is not plausible anymore. Hence, a rebrand.

LATEST NEWS

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.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.