Revisions incorporated into the Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 2010 claim that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission consider anticompetitive effects to product “variety” when evaluating mergers. The Guidelines do not, however, explain the methodology or tools that can...

Many online businesses, including most of the largest platforms, seek and provide attention. These online attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services, to merchants, developers and others...

The triumph of the self-preferencing doctrine is not confined to Europe but is found in many other jurisdictions as well. Korea is a case in point. On December 14, 2022, the Seoul High Court decided that the Korean competition authority (i.e., Korea Fair Trade Commission, ‘KFTC’) was right...

The triumph of the self-preferencing doctrine is not confined to Europe but is found in many other jurisdictions as well. Korea is a case in point. On December 14, 2022, the Seoul High Court decided that the Korean competition authority (i.e., Korea Fair Trade Commission, ‘KFTC’) was right...

International openness enhances social interactions between citizens of different countries or regions and vice versa. Social exchanges, in turn, increase trade flows between countries and influence markets and prices. We analyze the increased mobility that follows from openness between two...

The next generation of e-commerce will be conducted by digital agents, based on algorithms that will not only make purchase recommendations, but will also predict what we want, make purchase decisions, negotiate and execute the transaction for the consumers, and even automatically form...

Sellers are increasingly utilizing big data and sophisticated algorithms to price discriminate among customers. Indeed, we are approaching a world, where each consumer will be charged a personalized price for a personalized product or service. Is this type of price discrimination good or bad?...

Google distributes proprietary applications for its open-source Android mobile operating system (OS) free of charge. Some of those applications (apps) are offered together as a suite of apps known as Google Mobile Services (GMS). Manufacturers of mobile devices can agree, pursuant to Google's...

We show that loyalty discounts without buyer commitment create an externality among buyers because each buyer who signs a loyalty discount contract softens competition and raises prices for all buyers. This externality can enable an incumbent to use loyalty discounts to effectively divide the...