Georg Rilinger
Georg is an economic sociologist who studies how and why opportunities and incentives for socially destructive behavior emerge in markets. In his current project, he pursues these questions by analyzing the California energy crisis of 2000/01 as a case of failed market design. In the past, he has studied how criminal conspiracies manage to avoid regulatory oversight. Since October of 2020, he has been working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Prior to returning to Germany, he received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago where he was a Bradley Fellow at the Stigler Center.
Antitrust and Competition
The Texas Blackouts and the Problems of Electricity Market Design
Even in an ideal electricity market, reliability is an elusive and precarious byproduct of companies’ search for profits. Since market designers are...
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Antitrust and Competition
When Do Users Benefit From Platform Mergers?
A new paper shows that platform mergers can harness network effects at the cost of reducing the platform differentiation that users value.
Economic History Series
Harold Demsetz and Israel Kirzner Understood That Competition Regulates Markets
Economists Harold Demsetz and Israel Kirzner challenged the prevailing orthodoxy in microeconomic analysis and public policy beginning with their respective work in...
Antitrust and Competition
The Covid-19 Pandemic Should Not Delay Actions to Prevent Anticompetitive Consolidation in US Health Care Markets
Harvard Business School professor Leemore Dafny lays out potential reforms to assist agencies in halting anticompetitive acquisitions and practices, and to preserve...
Antitrust and Competition
Who Benefits From Competitive State-Level Legislatures?
A new paper finds that when interparty competition in state legislatures is high, well-connected and influential incumbent firms are best able to...
Corporate Governance
No More “Mystery Meat”: Why We Need Better Corporate Governance Data
Three decades of finance, economics, and legal studies in corporate governance have been built substantially on data sets with nearly unknown provenance....
Economic History Series
How Protests Against the Jim Crow Credit Market Changed the Civil Rights Movement
Before the civil rights movement captured the nation’s attention, activists and community groups were protesting against exploitative credit and exclusionary lending practices...
Corporate Governance
George Stigler and the Challenge of Democracy
We are all victims of what George Stigler described as “the pervasive use of state support of special groups” and of governance...
