Monopolies

Facebook Could Be Heading Towards a Breakup

Assuming Facebook’s acquisitions can be shown to have eliminated emerging rivals, reversing those acquisitions via divestiture—“the most important of antitrust remedies”—is the...

The Monopolists and the Pandemic: What Covid-19 Teaches Us About Concentrated Power

In the preface of his new book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People, Barry...

Webinar: Monopolies and the Rise of Nazism in Germany

The Stigler Center’s Monopolies and Politics Workshop Webinar Series explores some of the themes we'll explore at our 2020 Antitrust and Competition Conference: University...

How to Save 40 percent of the Payroll Protection Program’s Costs

Thanks to the loan program part of the CARES Act, small businesses can receive up to 2.5 times their monthly payroll, regardless of how much...

How Economic Concentration and Crony Capitalism Led to the Chaos in Chile

The signals of unrest in Chile mounted for years amid corruption scandals, rising inequality, and new monopolies. The fare increase on public transport that...

How the “Watergate Babies” Released the Beast of Monopoly Upon America

Why did Washington respond to the 2008 financial crisis by pushing even more wealth and power into the hands of the same people that...

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...

Restoring Antimonopoly Through Bright-Line Rules

The “consumer welfare” approach to antimonopoly is the main contributor to the extreme and dangerous concentrations of power that Americans face today. In place...

When the Interests of Monopolists and Authoritarians Coalesce

It is when the behemoth of monopoly enterprise consorts with the leviathan of the authoritarian state that both are likely to achieve permanence, writes...

If You Don’t Think Today’s Tech Giants Are Vicious, Just Ask Venture Capitalists

Silicon Valley today resembles the deepest part of the jungle known as the triple canopy, where tall trees block out all the light and...

LATEST NEWS

Reregulate.

Lee Hepner and William J. McGee respond to Clifford Winston’s ProMarket piece asserting that further deregulation of the airline industry would resolve problems in the industry. Instead, the authors claim a return to regulation would produce better results for travelers.

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.