Agreements not to compete are generally an anathema to free market advocates. Independent profit maximization is one of the fundamental assumptions of the neoclassical economic model and necessary to its conclusion that markets yield results that are Paraeto efficient. Consistent with this...

Theory predicts that in concentrated industries with high product similarity, horizontal acquisitions can effectively increase incumbent firms’ market power. Using a novel measure for industry product similarity, we show that in such industries firms’ propensity to make horizontal...

Common ownership fundamentally upsets the well-settled merger enforcement ecosystem. Not only it challenges basic principles informing merger policy such as the presumed profitability of mergers for the merging firms and the merger-specificity of potential efficiencies but also it works against...

Partial ownership of stock in multiple competing firms is an important scholarly and policy topic in both corporate and antitrust law. Until now, the discussion has focused on ownership. This essay shifts the debate from a focus on common ownership to a focus on common control. No prior work has...

Minority shareholdings have been on the regulatory agenda of competition authorities for some time. Recent empirical studies, however, draw attention to a new, thought provoking theory of harm: common ownership by institutional investors holding small, parallel equity positions in several...

Walmart is one of the most successful companies in the world. With more than $ 524 billion in 2020 revenue and 2.2 million employees, Walmart is the world's largest company by sales volume and is ranked 19th on the Forbes list of the world's largest public companies. Walmart serves nearly 265...

A phenomenon known as “Common Ownership” arises when shareholders hold substantial stakes in competing firms. Although recent empirical evidence has illustrated how common concentrated owners are associated with higher product market prices and lower output, scholars remain divided as to the...

Whether and how copyright promotes creative expression is the central question of copyright law. The standard rationale—that copyright provides economic incentives to create—has attracted sustained critique. Supplementing existing theories, this Article advances a novel organizational theory...

One of the most striking and undertheorized aspects of fields that commercialize patented technologies is the dynamic interplay of structural forces pushing toward consolidation. Of course, technological industries are complex ecosystems featuring numerous players of different sizes along the...

We present a simple model of common ownership in which an investor chooses its stake in competing firms in light of the effects on firm behavior and firm profits. Two firms compete in Cournot duopoly, and ownership affects a firm’s objective function in the manner posited by Bresnahan & Salop...