antitrust and competition

In a recent revision of its Premerger Notification Regulation, the FTC removed labor market provisions from the previous draft as Commissioner Melissa Holyoak dismissed them as "a solution in search of a nonexistent problem." Eric Posner argues that her assessment contradicts a substantial body of academic research showing that labor market concentration is indeed a serious concern.

The Stigler Center is inviting submissions of short academic pieces (up to 2000 words) focused on how economic concentration can impact the marketplace of ideas. The authors of the best submissions will have their work published on ProMarket and will be invited to discuss their ideas at the Stigler Center’s 2025 Antitrust and Competition Conference, which will take place in Chicago on April 10-11, 2025.

In a survey of nearly 400 European firms that export abroad, Elena Argentesi, Livia De Simone, Stephan Paetz, Vincenzo Scrutinio find that most firms believe that competition forces them to produce cheaper and higher quality products and services, allowing them to be more competitive in foreign markets.

Alessia D’Amico and Inge Graef discuss Mario Draghi’s proposal for a New Competition Tool to revamp competition in the European Union. They write the European Commission must think hard about its design to achieve the right balance.

Lulu Wang writes that the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Visa for maintaining a monopoly in the debit card market will, if victorious, only impact a fraction of the transaction fees that burden merchants. And if the lawsuit opens up the market to more competition, there are reasons to believe a more fractured card network could end up hurting consumers and merchants.

Jonathan B. Baker and Fiona Scott Morton challenge the interpretations of two new papers from Carl Shapiro & Ali Yurukoglu and Nathan Miller, which question economy-wide trends toward a rise in market power and, if any such trend has occurred, that it is due to lax antitrust enforcement.

In his recent article, John Kwoka accepts the antitrust community’s general opinion that Procter & Gamble requires courts and the antitrust agencies to weigh plaintiff rebuttals that a merger can produce extraordinary efficiencies even if it reduces competition. Jerry Cayford argues that this is an inaccurate reading of the Supreme Court’s decision, and it has hampered enforcement for decades.

Mario Draghi’s report on raising European competitiveness contains two insights about competition policy. First, competition policy has a small but significant role to play in closing the “innovation gap” between the European Union, the United States and China. Second, increasing European productivity demands “revamping” competition through the introduction of technical-legal reforms.  

Steven C. Salop writes that only Google’s full divestiture of its Android operating system can avoid incentives on the part of Android and Google to preference Google’s apps, including its search engine, and stifle competition.

Over the past four years, antitrust scrutiny has increasingly focused on large technology firms. Ginger Zhe Jin and Liad Wagman discuss the complexities of antitrust enforcement and policy in the digital age, highlighting the challenges of promoting innovation while fostering competition, and areas where consumer protection and antitrust are colliding or are set to collide. To that end, the authors identify several key questions that the next administration of the United States should address to better delineate between legal and illegal competitive practices in the digital age, with implications for the broader economy.