This paper presents the late convergence process from US economists that led them to support a strong antitrust enforcement in the late thirties despite their long standing distrust toward this legislation. The 1945 Alcoa decision crafted by Judge Hand embodied the results of this convergence. The purpose of antitrust law enforcement does not consi...
International audience
Published in Review of Industrial Organization
Critics from both the right and the left claim that modern antitrust doctrine, rooted in consumer welfare, is inadequate to handle the challenges of the twenty-first century economy. They express nostalgia for 1960s antitrust, when the field had no clear objectives and cases were decided on impressionistic notions of “fairness” and good corporate c...
Published in Review of Industrial Organization
This paper shows that two related aspects of attention platforms are important for the sound economic analysis of public policy including antitrust: first, attention platforms generate valuable content. Even though people often don’t pay for content, we know from revealed preference that content is valuable because people spend a considerable amoun...
Published in IIC - International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law
In dealing with anti-competitive conduct in the intellectual property domain, competition authorities can utilize a variety of sanctions and remedies to ensure that the technology market is not affected by such conduct and that the innovation growth rate does not decline under the shadow of corporate greed. This article examines competition law mea...
Published in Review of Industrial Organization
The emergence of large technology platforms has raised fundamental questions about antitrust enforcement. These questions, which are the subject of this RIO special issue, are now challenging scholars and policy makers. The topics covered here include the role of economics and the consumer welfare standard in antitrust; lessons from historic antitr...
Published in Review of Industrial Organization
This paper asks whether the large amounts of digital data that are typically observed on large technology platforms—such as Google, Facebook, Uber and Amazon—typically give rise to structural conditions that would lead to antitrust concerns. In particular, I evaluate whether digital data augments or decreases concerns with regard to network effects...
Published in Review of Industrial Organization
In this paper, we discuss whether the consumer welfare (CW) standard needs to be replaced or revised in order for antitrust law to deal effectively with the economic challenges of the platform economy. We argue that both the general and platform-specific assaults on the CW standard are misguided, that the CW standard is capable of addressing the ec...
Published in Review of Industrial Organization
Recent calls for using the antitrust laws to break up the large Internet giants are misplaced for a number of reasons. First, similar efforts against oil, tobacco, motion-picture, and telecommunications monopolies have not proved to be beneficial to economic welfare. Second, the failure to break up Microsoft using Section 2 has not proved to be a m...
Published in Review of Industrial Organization
Multisided platforms have distinct and critical features that set them apart from single-sided markets. This realization has led to a split among courts, antitrust practitioners, and economists as to the best method to assess whether mergers or conduct that involve platforms result in the creation or maintenance of monopoly power and violate the an...
