Since Oliver Williamson published Markets and Hierarchies in 1975 transaction cost economics (TCE) has claimed an important place in antitrust, avoiding the extreme positions of the two once reigning schools of antitrust policy. At one extreme was the “structural” school, which saw market...

This paper shows that two related aspects of attention platforms are important for the sound economic analysis of public policy including antitrust: First, attention platforms generate valuable content. Even though people often don't pay for content, we know from revealed preference that content...

Market power on each side of a multisided platform, whether in the form of increasing prices or decreasing quality, is constrained by the risk of losing sales on the other sides. That tends to weaken market power on each side and encourages platforms to keep prices lower and quality higher than...

Something old and important is lost sight of in a case like Ohio v. American Express, the Supreme Court's recent adoption of "platform" or "two-sided market" theory in American antitrust, and in theoretical efforts like the one on which it is based. A rarely discussed idea built in to American...

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...

The new economics of multi-sided platforms involves a number of concepts that are familiar to economists as well as some new ones. This glossary, which is drawn from our book Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multi-sided Platforms, is an attempt to put together the main concepts and to provide...

During antitrust's "inhospitality era," courts and expert agencies condemned any number of non-standard agreements as "unlawful per se" or nearly so. More recently, courts and agencies have repudiated or softened many such per se rules. In so doing courts and agencies have invoked the lessons of...

When successive monopolies transact through noncooperative linear pricing, the resulting double markup decreases their joint profits relative to vertical integration. However, if there are downstream rivals (which are not double marginalized), the same noncooperative interaction often...

In Albrecht v. Herald Co., 390 U.S. 145 (1968) the Supreme Court declared vertical maximum price fixing unlawful per se. The Court identified three potential negative consequences of maximum rpm: (1) the agreement may fix prices too low for the dealer to provide services that enhance the quality...

This paper incorporates the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law, Sociology, Behavioral and Political Sciences) and suggests a holistic framework for analysis of agrarian contracts. First, it specifies type and importance of...