Economic inequality recently has entered the political discourse in a highly visible way. This political impact is not a surprise. As the U.S. economy has begun to recover from the Great Recession since mid-2009, economic growth has effectively been appropriated by those already well off,...

The standard Ricardian model of competition has a fixed number of firms, each with limited capacity and differential exogenous costs or qualities. In this paper, we introduce a real entry process by formulating a multistage Ricardian equilibrium model with free entry and stochastic product...

There are two overarching legal paradigms for analyzing exclusionary conduct in antitrust – predatory pricing and the raising rivals’ costs characterization of foreclosure. Sometimes the choice of paradigm is obvious. Other times, it may depend on the structure of the plaintiff’s...

This comment responds to the request by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division for public comment on the draft 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. In this comment, we show that there is an inherent loss of an indirect competitor and competition when a...

These recommendations and comments respond to the request by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division for public comment on the draft 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. We commend the agencies for updating the 1984 non-horizontal merger guidelines by...

Among the proposed remedies in the Microsoft case are structural remedies that would create competition in operating systems for personal computers. One criticism that has been raised against such remedies is that they would lead to "fragmentation" of the Windows standard. According to this...

The US District Court in the AT&T/Time Warner vertical merger case has issued its opinion permitting the merger. At of this writing in August 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has appealed to the DC Circuit and filed its brief, as have several Amici. I was disappointed that the DOJ was...

This paper explores cooperation incentives in the absence of public reputation information, using an infinite-horizon Prisoners' Dilemma model of sequential relationships. We examine a strategy which we call Quit-for-Tat (QFT). In this model, individuals initially are paired randomly. In the...

The conservative critique of antitrust law has been highly influential and has facilitated a transformation of antitrust standards of conduct since the 1970s and led to increasingly more permissive standards of conduct. While these changes have taken many forms, all were influenced by the view...

We study strategic behavior by private litigants when courts' judgments are "inalienable" in the sense that it is unlawful to contract around them ex post. Inalienable judgments arise in many contexts, including antitrust, labor law, intellectual property, unfair competition, and various types...