Ben Bewick is an experienced economic consultant currently pursuing a masters in antitrust economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has consulted on mergers & acquisitions and antitrust litigation in technology markets.
A new field experiment sheds light on why Google continues to dominate the search engine market despite regulatory interventions and the availability of alternatives. The authors find that while Google offers higher quality, consumer overestimation of this advantage—along with inattention and default effects—helps entrench its market power and limits the effectiveness of proposed antitrust remedies.