Stigler

The “Conspiracy” of Consumer Welfare Theory

Matt Stoller argues there was a conspiracy. It was more of an association with a singular purpose.

Antitrust and Rule by Judges

The early-1980s Posner-Stigler memorandum to incoming president Reagan’s transition team is interesting for a host of reasons, but most of all in...

Mergers and Smoking Guns

A recently uncovered memo from George Stigler and Richard Posner reveals how they thought about antitrust and merger policy in advising the...

A Richard Posner and George Stigler Memo: “Throttling Back on Antitrust: A Practical Proposal for Deregulation”

A 1980s memo from Richard Posner and George J. Stigler to President-elect Ronald Reagan sheds light on their policy advocation for the...

Announcing the Participants in the Fall 2021 Stigler Center Journalists in Residence Program

This month, the Stigler Center will welcome eight world-class journalists from the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, Romania, Ukraine, Slovenia, and the United...

The Durable Impact of Stigler’s Theory of Economic Regulation

George Stigler’s “The Theory of Economic Regulation” was an early application of public choice reasoning to a practical problem—the work of regulatory...

Economic Regulation After George Stigler

George Stigler’s “The Theory of Economic Regulation” has left a lasting impact on the academic and real-world practice of regulatory policy. Fifty...

“Monetary Awards Are Not the Only Reason Why Whistleblowers Report Corporate Malpractice”

At the SEC, Jordan Thomas had a leadership role in developing the program to protect and reward employees who report corporate wrongdoing. Now, he is...

How to Restore Competition in Digital Advertising Markets and Protect Users

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is considering a range of interventions in digital advertising markets, among them obliging Google to share click and query...

Data-Driven Ideology: The Problem With Economists' Takeover of Policymaking

According to New York Times journalist Binyamin Appelbaum's recent book The Economists' Hour, economics is not the unbiased science that it pretends to be, but...

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.