antitrust and competition
Fair Treatment of Consumers at Any Price?
Many scholars and policymakers have suggested regulating firms’ ability to price discriminate between consumers when they operate in a market prone to inactive users,...
“Consumer Welfare Is Dead”: What Do We Do Instead?—A Perspective from Europe
“Consumer Welfare” has lost its place as the animating value and standard for modern antitrust. The standard is almost universally regarded as bunk and...
Understanding the DOJ’s Decision To Seek a Jury Trial in the Google Ad Tech Case
The Department of Justice recently sued Google for conduct relating to its ad tech services, accusing the search giant of unlawful monopolization. In an...
Gauging Common Ownership in Fintech Markets
A new empirical paper estimates the scope and impact of common ownership in fintech markets. The authors find limited common ownership among private fintech...
Structuring a Structural Presumption for Merger Review
The consumer welfare standard can’t be saved with more theory. The problem is how it works in practice, and solving that means changing the...
Race and the Consumer Welfare Standard
The consumer welfare standard employs a collective consumer in its model when evaluating possibly anticompetitive behavior. This aggregated approach fails to recognize that such...
Today’s Tax Code Empowers Monopolistic Corporations. It Has Been and Can Be Different
Niko Lusiani and Susan Holmberg write that the United States should tax profitable corporations not just to raise revenue and redistribute unequal gains but...
The Effective Competitive Constraint Standard
The consumer welfare standard, which broadly considers higher output and lower prices as its primary goals, is not well equipped to monitor the numerous...
Locating Competitive Process Claims in the Consumer Welfare Debate
Debates about the consumer welfare standard have failed to produce a consensus around either its scope or an alternative standard. Regardless of the outcome...
The Life of Antitrust’s Consumer Welfare Model
“Consumer welfare” as an objective of antitrust law and regulation has its origins in several vague and even conflicting ideas of how to evaluate...
