The Role of the State

The European Commission has struggled to tackle excessive prices in Europe, despite evidence of how they arise in relation to market power. Aline Blankertz, Todd Davies, Justine Haekens, and Nicholas Shaxson argue that adopting accounting and financial analysis as part of its toolkit can enable the Commission to understand and act when firms are exploiting their market power.

Reed Showalter argues that the suggestion that antitrust can be ringfenced from democracy or the democratic process is erroneous. Antitrust is fundamentally a body...

Yunsieg P. Kim argues that economic regulation, including antitrust, can only be democratic if it is the choice of well-informed citizens. This article is part...

Erik Peinert explores the paradoxical relationship between economic concentration and democracy, where economic concentration compromises the democratic process and democratic backsliding also gains momentum by taking advantage of concentrated market actors, whose political power is now impotent, to capture civil society.

Sean Sullivan discusses the role public opinion should play in setting antitrust policy and what should be left to the expert economists.

Recent years have witnessed a significant wave of initiatives aimed at expanding antitrust’s substantive reach and reinvigorating enforcement, both to counter decades of weakened enforcement and to address contemporary economic realities. These efforts have coincided with calls to “democratize” antitrust by engaging the public in policymaking. Barak Orbach argues that such “democratized antitrust” is impractical, but boundary-pushing dynamics are central to the evolution of antitrust. He offers a conceptual guide for antitrust boundary pushing.

Gerhard Schick discusses the CumEx and CumCum share-trading scandals that cost German taxpayers billions of euros over the course of several decades and the failures in political and social institutions that allowed these scandals to persist for so long.

Former Federal Trade Commissioner and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra writes that as the federal government circumvents the rule of law by pardoning corporate infractions and crimes in exchange for political favors, individual states, citizens, and businesses will need to pursue private actions against corporate wrongdoing.

Max von Thun and Claire Lavin argue that the European Commission must revise its merger guidelines to emphasize how competition policy can protect goals beyond prices, including innovation, security, and democracy. This will create a more prosperous European Union.

Erik Hovenkamp and A. Douglas Melamed discuss what Judge Amit Mehta got right and wrong in his remedy decision in the Google Search antitrust case.