Consumers have been left out of the great debate over the mission of the firm, in which advocates of shareholder value maximization face off against advocates of corporate social responsibility, who would allow management leeway to allocate profits to workers and other non-shareholder insiders...

The reason for which the Supreme Court's embrace of rules of reason—case-by-case analysis of suspect conduct for harm to consumers—has greatly reduced antitrust enforcement over the past forty years is not that rules of reason are biased, but rather that rules of reason are too expensive for...

Economists have long recognized that advertising has two main functions: to inform and to persuade. In the information age, the information function is obsolete, because consumers can get all the product information they want from a quick Google search. That makes virtually all advertising today...

It is easy to get the impression from reading economics that property generally, and property in ideas in particular, is efficient. This impression is meaningful because it suggests that there is no efficiency rationale for government regulation of any kind other than the institution and defense...

Law and economics are both hostile to liability for exposure to risk without actual harm. Harm is the foundation of civil remedies. Economics teaches that adequate compensation in the event of harm eliminates risk, obviating the need for compensation for exposure. I show that if there is risk...

Antitrust prohibits cartels from charging monopoly prices but does not prohibit monopolies from charging monopoly prices. Antitrust does not ban monopoly pricing by monopolies because it thinks that unless a monopoly takes affirmative action to exclude competitors, competitors will enter the...

The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products. In the mid-twentieth...

Over the past forty years, antitrust has come to embrace a goal of consumer welfare maximization that cannot be achieved solely through condemnation of collusive or exclusionary conduct. To address cases in which firms achieve the power to raise prices and harm consumers without engaging in...

Settlements of patent litigation between branded and generic drug makers that include a promise by the generic maker to stay out of the market, sometimes in exchange for a ‘reverse' payment, increase the profits of drug makers at the expense of consumers. Some commentators argue that drug...