The Role of the State

Paid to Show the Drug Works: Why “Blind” Clinical Trials for New Drugs are Far Less Blind Than They Should Be

New research shows that physicians in industry-sponsored trials are more captured by pharmaceutical companies than physicians in unsponsored ones. Economists love health care because it...

It Is Such a Small World: The Market-Design Academic Community Evolved in a Business Network

Private equity funds such as Michael Dell's MSD Capital made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the 2017 FCC spectrum auction, thanks...

How Market Design Economists Helped Engineer a Mass Privatization of Public Resources

In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission conducted a complex two-sided auction to reallocate spectrum from broadcasters to mobile communications companies. The way economists designed...

The Death of Independent Podcasting: What Spotify Is Trying to Do With the Joe Rogan Deal

Spotify is gaining power over podcast distribution by either buying production directly or striking exclusive deals, as it did with Rogan. Once it has...

Amazon-Owned Movie Theaters: the Next Step in Entertainment Industry Consolidation

Amazon is in talks to buy AMC Theaters, whose business model was jeopardized by the coronavirus pandemic. Other streaming companies, such as Disney and...

Launching the New, Improved ProMarket

We are very excited to present to you our new design for ProMarket. In addition to our usual mix of articles based on academic...

The Price of Democracy: a Webinar with Julia Cagé, Andrea Prat, and Guy Rolnik

At this trying time, there is a particularly high demand for reliable and trustworthy information. To address this demand by Booth students, alumni, faculty,...

Much of Antitrust Law Today Is Based on Unsupported or Demonstrably False Economic Theories. Will Economists Take Heed?

Many of the economic assumptions of contemporary antitrust law are unsupported or false, as the executive branch and judiciary have remade the law in...

How Airline Alliances Convinced Regulators That Collusion Reduces Prices

The Department of Transportation granted antitrust immunity to Atlantic alliances that reduced competition on the basis of a single paper written by a United...

Political Economy of Covid-19: Surveillance and the Future of Privacy

Join the Stigler Center on Monday, May 11, for a conversation with The Markup’s editor-in-chief Julia Angwin and University of Chicago Law professor Lior Strahilevitz,...

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