antitrust and competition

In new research, Yoan Hermstrüwer and David Imhof analyze how AI can help antitrust authorities predict cartels by assessing international bidding data in countries with similar legal and market structures.

India is working on legislating new competition rules to govern artificial intelligence and other tech markets. But recommendations from a recent report by the Competition Commission of India suggest it might revert to old competition standards that will likely prove ineffectual in governing the new AI market, writes Abhineet Nayyar.

China’s new safe harbor rules for vertical dealing, including practices like resale price maintenance hitherto presumed generally anticompetitive, are less accommodating than they may seem, writes Yin Hu.

Antitrust agencies were right to suspect that Netflix’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery would have harmed consumers, content creators, and rival streaming platforms. They needed the consumer welfare standard to show how, writes Sean D. Reyes.

Meta prevailed in its monopoly case against the Federal Trade Commission by showing that the FTC’s market definition of personal social media was too narrow. However, Meta’s argument—and Judge James Boasberg’s ruling—rested on a flawed empirical assumption that confuses how users divert their time to other activities when no longer able to use a Meta platform with true product substitution.

In a new volume chapter, Shai Agmon and Samuel Bagg argue that academic and policy references to “competition” often fail to distinguish between competition’s many forms. Their disaggregation of competition into two complementary processes—parallel and friction competition—helps to clarify the neo-Brandeisian approach to competition policy and its advantages over the traditional consumer welfare approach.

In new research, Alejandro Herrera-Caicedo, Jessica Jeffers, and Elena Prager find that firms that share a C-suite executive or board director are much more...

Antitrust authorities increasingly assess mergers through the lens of innovation, particularly in research-intensive sectors such as pharmaceuticals. In new research, Carmine Ornaghi and Lorenzo Cassi show how mergers disrupt human capital and reduce innovation in what they call manslaughter acquisitions.

Judge Amit Mehta’s remedies for Google’s search monopoly stopped short of banning payments for default search placement, reflecting the hope that generative AI will erode the power of traditional search. Cristian Santesteban argues the opposite: in the AI era of search, defaults may matter more by steering critical data and learning signals from AI-powered search sessions to the most dominant product. This mechanism can potentially compound Google’s advantage.

On the 150th anniversary of the first telephone call, John Haigh, Nancy Rose, and Jonathan Sallet reflect on lessons from the history of telecommunications...