monopoly

Too Many Economists Are Using a Flawed Theory To Defend Dominant Platforms’ Self-Preferencing Practices

Congress is currently considering two major bills that would regulate “self-preferencing” and related conduct by dominant digital platforms. Criticism of these bills...

The Understated Relationship Between Market Dominance and Political Influence

A new model explains the feedback loop between monopolies and politicians and the unexpected developments in the relationships between the two, as...

How and Why Baseball’s Legal Monopoly Came to Be

Baseball’s antitrust exemption, currently the subject of fierce political backlash, has long been a historical curiosity. Why has a professional sports league...

Why We Need To Re-think Friedman’s Ideas About Monopolies

Friedman’s New York Times Magazine article on the social purpose of business was a specific intervention in the debate over shareholder activism...

Senator Klobuchar’s Antitrust Bill Doesn’t Go Far Enough

Senator Klobuchar’s bill includes many useful proposals to bolster antitrust enforcement, but the antitrust laws have been so weakened by the courts...

What the Biden DOJ Can Learn From the Clinton and Obama Years on How to Tackle America’s Monopoly Problem 

The Clinton DOJ attacked international cartels. The Obama DOJ prioritized merger enforcement. The Biden DOJ needs to focus on America’s monopoly problem.

Why Isn’t the FTC Tackling Facebook’s Data-opoly?

Nothing in the FTC’s and states’ complaints’ prayer for relief seeks to give users greater control over their data, such as not...

What Should the Biden Administration’s Antitrust Agenda Look Like? A Roundtable

How will US antitrust policy look under President Joe Biden? We caught up with four antitrust experts—Jonathan Baker, Zephyr Teachout, William Kovacic,...

The Roots of Congress’ Pathbreaking Report on Big Tech

While the House Judiciary report is chock-full of impressive “gotcha” moments concerning anticompetitive conduct by tech platforms, the real bombshell is the...

What the US Economy Could Look Like if Digital Markets Were Open and Competitive

The US House of Representatives' investigation into digital platforms has opened Americans' eyes to the widespread harms that flow from the illegal...

LATEST NEWS

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.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.