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

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.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.