I present an overview of the antitrust literature on sports leagues, with particular emphasis on the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League, as well as on sanctioning...

Practices and conducts in professional and even amateur sports can be subject to competition laws as soon as commercial activities are involved. From an economic perspective, this implies that both directly commercial activities like the sale of broadcasting/media rights and indirectly...

This comment addresses the opinion of the Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice on the pending case European Super League versus UEFA/FIFA. It takes a critical perspective on selected aspects of the opinion’s reasoning from a (sports) economics perspective. Highlighting the...

The rule of reason is the standard for testing whether a restraint of trade violates the Sherman Act. The thesis of this article is that the only issue under the rule of reason is the impact of a restraint on the competitive process; the Sherman Act does not employ a welfare standard. This...

We show that the number of merger proposals (frequency-based deterrence) is a more appropriate indicator of underlying changes in merger policy than the relative anti-competitiveness of merger proposals (composition-based deterrence). This has strong implications for the empirical analysis of...

Should the FTC have allowed Zillow to acquire its foremost rival, Trulia? It is increasingly well-accepted that digital platforms tend toward dominance in their immediately adjacent relevant-product markets. Google, for example, has long held a majority share of the markets for general-search...

Competition law accommodates two different contexts within which economics may be applied, each defined by a distinct type of cause-effect relationships. First, there are effects of competition law on business conduct (deterrence effects), embodying the fact that businesses take into account...

The European Commission appears to be considering to open a new antitrust case against the owners of the FIA Formula One World Championship (F1), which by some accounts represents the second biggest sports business in the world. Specifically, two interrelated concerns are raised: (i) a violation...

America's failing antitrust system is, in large part, to blame for today's market power problem. Lax antitrust law and enforcement have allowed troubling trends like corporate consolidation to remain unchallenged, further embedding our skewed economy. In highly consolidated markets, consumers...