The four reports that will be presented at the Stigler Center’s Digital Platforms, Markets and Democracy conference offer a compelling case for regulatory action and a very powerful array of solutions.
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How to Protect Competition and Consumers in Digital Markets
While some markets may self-correct, rapid self-correction in markets dominated by large digital platforms is unlikely. The economy and market structure subcommittee of the Stigler Center’s Digital Platforms Project proposes ways to reform antitrust law and regulation in order to adequately deliver competition to consumers.
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How to Protect the News Media in the Age of Digital Platforms
Digital platforms present a new formidable threat to the news media that market forces will not correct if left to their own devices. The media subcommittee of the Stigler Center’s Digital Platforms Project proposes ways to strengthen independent, strong, and rigorous accountability journalism.
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How to Mitigate the Political Impacts of Social Media and Digital Platform Concentration
Ahead of its annual conference on Digital Platforms, Markets and Democracy, the Stigler Center formed a committee to produce independent white papers that will inform policymakers on how to address the political and economic issues raised by tech platforms. In preparation for the conference, we are publishing the executive summary of each preliminary report.
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Restoring Antimonopoly Through Bright-Line Rules
The “consumer welfare” approach to antimonopoly is the main contributor to the extreme and dangerous concentrations of power that Americans face today. In place of this vague, subjective, easily manipulated, and fundamentally corrupt framework, we propose a system of simple rules that is true to the original American approach to building and protecting an open and democratic society.
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When We Outsource Privacy Compliance, We May Undermine Privacy Protection
Privacy law is currently being shaped and implemented by a new industry of third-party tech vendors. These companies code their own interpretations of privacy laws into the designs of their products, but many are doing so without legal expertise.
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The Anticompetitive Effects of Current Capital Regulation
Some features of the capital regulation that was designed to increase the safety of the financial system may have unintended consequences on the competitive environment, argues new study.
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The Greatest Anticompetitive Threat of Our Time: Fixing the Horizontal Shareholding Problem
Undisputed empirical studies confirm that horizontal shareholding poses a great anticompetitive threat. What can antitrust enforcers do about it? Quite a lot, in fact.
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Ten Years After the Financial Crisis: “We Are Safer, But Not As Safe As We Should and Could Be”
Experts from academia and industry gathered at the University of Oxford to revisit what went wrong in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, whether the actions that were taken since seem sufficient, and the risks that might forestall a new crisis.
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Loose Policies Around Close Elections Highlight the Political Limits of Macroprudential Regulation
What can policymakers do to prevent future financial crises? An emerging consensus holds that so-called macroprudential regulation is key: policies that aim to mitigate risks to the financial system as a whole. In a recent paper, Karsten Müller of Princeton shows that such policies were systematically loosened in the run-up to two-hundred seventeen elections across 58 countries. This raises the question of whether regulators can, in practice, withstand political pressures.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (August 18–25)
America’s white-collar prosecution crisis; Elizabeth Warren has a new bill that aims to separate money from politics; Facebook struggles with the daunting task of moderating 2 billion people; and is Google risking press freedom by re-entering the Chinese market?
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A Former Central Banker Tells Other Central Bankers: “Stay Away From Davos”
In an interview with ProMarket, former Bank of England deputy governor Sir Paul Tucker explains why the “unelected power” of central bankers threatens our system of government.
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