The automotive industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation driven by digitization, enabling original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to exert increasing control over vehicle functions, data, and - consequently - aftersales markets. Despite high relevance for consumers, regulatory scrutiny...

This paper evaluates the recent literature claiming that the US economy has generally become less competitive causing the US economy to perform poorly and that lax antitrust policy is one important reason for the decline in economic performance. Although there certainly are empirical facts...

Platforms like Uber, Google Search, and Hulu pervade the modern economic landscape. A platform caters to distinct but deeply-interdependent “sides” of customers that derive value or revenues from one another, such as the merchants and cardholders on a credit card network, or the advertisers...

This article examines the conditions when predatory pricing or exclusive dealing antitrust principles should be the controlling legal standard for the evaluation of single product loyalty discount contracts. Following Meritor, it clarifies what it means for price to be “the predominant...

This chapter analyzes Big Data and Big Data abuses of market power. The chapter provides an overview of developments under both EU and US case law relevant to such abuses as well as some of the economic underpinnings of such an analysis. While there are not many cases specific to this interface,...

For more than half a century, courts have viewed certain uses of intellectual property (IP) as misuse, rendering the IP unenforceable until the misuse is purged. The doctrine began with patents, but courts have recently extended it to copyrights. In most cases, it reflects concern over...

Periods of profound innovation and technological change invariably result in short run winners and losers. The rise of big box retailers like Wal-Mart, as well as the existence of large supermarket chains, has led competition authorities to focus anew on the issue of buyer power. Antitrust...

Consider a monopolist in one market that faces competition in a second market. Bundled loyalty discounts, in which customers receive a price break on the monopoly good in exchange for making all purchases from the monopolist, have ambiguous welfare effects. To analyze such discounts as predatory...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

This chapter analyzes the private rationale and the social costs and benefits of market foreclosure, here defined as a firm's restriction of output in one market through the use of market power in another market. The chapter first focuses on vertical foreclosure (in which full access to a...