This essay summarizes our work on brands and competition. Brands and brand management have become a central feature of the modern economy and a staple of business theory and business practice. Brands also have important effects on competition and the marketplace; yet the two key areas of law...

Blockchain technology has in recent years captured attention and funding based on its promise to build trust among multiple parties without the need for a trusted intermediary. Born out of government-funded research on game theoretic Byzantine consensus, it offers the prospect of a more...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

This chapter analyzes Big Data and Big Data abuses of market power. The chapter provides an overview of developments under both EU and US case law relevant to such abuses as well as some of the economic underpinnings of such an analysis. While there are not many cases specific to this interface,...

This paper offers an opportunity to reflect on Frank Easterbrook’s seminal work on the Limits of Antitrust and to discuss its particular relevance to the problem of antitrust enforcement in the face of innovation. The error-cost framework in antitrust originates with Easterbrook’s analysis,...

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) released its Digital Platform Services Inquiry, Interim Report No. 5 (Regulatory Reform) in September 2022. In December 2022, the Australian Treasury requested comments on the report. The ACCC Report recommends, inter alia, several...

This is a time of passionate debate on the fundamental goals of competition law. Should there be a single overarching goal for all of competition law and policy? Should that goal be framed in purely economic terms? Should antitrust focus on protecting the competitive process, preventing unfair...

Trademark law’s current conception of information and how trademarks enable information transmission is underdeveloped. It has led to a world where trademark law hinders rather than “fosters the flow of information in markets.” Instead of promoting information exchange across and within...

We show that loyalty discounts without buyer commitment create an externality among buyers because each buyer who signs a loyalty discount contract softens competition and raises prices for all buyers. This externality can enable an incumbent to use loyalty discounts to effectively divide the...

We show that loyalty discounts with buyer commitments create anticompetitive effects beyond those possible with pure exclusive dealing. The loyalty discount adds a seller commitment to maintain a distinction between the loyal and disloyal price. This seller commitment reduces the seller's...