This Essay describes an approach for designing antitrust rules for assessing whether firms have engaged in anticompetitive unilateral practices that is based in part on the error-cost framework pioneered by Judge Easterbrook. We focus particularly on the role of economic theory and evidence in...

We examine the impact to date of the Reserve Bank of Australia's decision to reduce interchange fees on credit cards in Australia by almost half. We find that, in the short run, issuers have recovered between 30 and 40 percent of the loss of interchange fees. Merchants have benefited from lower...

European competition laws condemn as “exploitative abuses” the pricing policies of dominant firms that may result in a direct loss of consumer welfare. Article 82(a) of the EC Treaty, for example, expressly states that imposing “unfair” prices on consumers by dominant suppliers...

On the basis of anecdotes centered on the alleged "circuitous routing of checks," researchers focusing on the pre-Fed check-clearing system have usually argued that it was inefficient. In this paper we study a 1910 check remittance register from the State National Bank of Bloomington,...

Competition in many important industries centers on investment in intellectual property. Firms engage in dynamic, Schumpeterian competition for the market, through sequential winner-take-all races to produce drastic innovations, rather than through static price/output competition in the market....

Software platforms are a critical component of the computer systems underpinning leading– edge products ranging from third– generation mobile phones to video games. After describing some key economic features of computer systems and software platforms, the paper presents case studies of...