antitrust and competition

For decades antitrust agencies, courts, and scholars have debated whether Section 7 of the Clayton Act permits an efficiency defense, in which merging firms can argue that enhanced efficiencies from the merger show that it does not reduce competition. However, the Supreme Court’s recent establishment of the “major questions doctrine,” which enforces or re-enforces a textualist reading of regulatory statues, undermines proponents of the efficiency defense, because the Clayton Act does not clearly and explicitly contain an efficiency defense. The “major questions doctrine” essentially acts as textualism on steroids,” writes Robert H. Lande.

Firms can now charge each shopper a different price, and regulators worry that the gains will flow from consumers to companies. But personalized pricing has two built-in limits: shoppers learn to hide how much they want things, and cheap purchases can be resold, writes Nursultan Mukhtaruly.

The Digital Markets Act establishes central rules and enforcement for digital platforms across the European Union, but allows decentralized private enforcement on the national level. In new research, Lena Hornkohl and Barbara Justen reflect on how two recent German court cases show how national litigation can make the DMA more effective, but also highlight the need for mechanisms that aid in consistent interpretation.

Consumers are anxious about the economy, and it’s due not only to inflation but to market power that raises prices and reduces quality, variety, and innovation. Policymakers’ prescriptions for resolving the cost-of-living crisis have mostly ignored the role of antitrust policy, but waning competition is at the heart of these problems, writes Diana L. Moss.

In new research, Elettra Bietti compares the efficacy of the two legal avenues that have arisen to restrain social media’s ability to monopolize people’s time and attention: antitrust policy and product liability for consumer harm. Looking at the results of two recent Meta cases, she finds that product liability has proven the most capable in introducing the frictions needed to reduce social media’s addictive design.

The Chicago School believed that markets operate best when they are left to organize themselves, and that state regulation only disrupts this process to...

The United States government launched the American AI Exports Program to help American firms win contracts from international customers. In a bid to enhance international competitiveness, the program risks stifling domestic competition, writes Javaid Sofi.

The Neo-Brandeisians and Chicago School have employed different statistics to show respectively that markets are both concentrated and not concentrated, leaving Americans in the dark about who really holds corporate power. The evidence only looks contradictory due to the failure of American antitrust scholarship and regulation to understand how conglomerates collect market power across many neighboring markets, through what Paul Friederiszick calls “adjacent market takeovers.” This strategy can make firms more efficient, but it can also raise prices and weaken competition even as each individual market still looks competitive, he writes, drawing on his new paper, “The Conglomerate Power Puzzle.”

Two recent court rulings on casino-hotels using a shared software to fix prices reveal the importance of information exchanges as a super plus factor: an indicator of illegal conspiracy to limit trade. Roger D. Blair and Javier D. Donna discuss how these court cases and other recent lawsuits elucidate the role of the information exchange and the two vectors that determine its strength as a plus factor: data sensitivity and a give-to-get understanding among firms that if they shared their data, competitors would do the same.

The artificial intelligence industry recently called for an antitrust exemption to coordinate self-regulation as the risks their models pose to the internet and society...