A highly competitive economy is characterized by strong, legally respected property rights. A failure to afford legal protection to certain types of property will reduce individual incentives to participate in market transactions, thereby reducing the effectiveness of market competition. As the great economist Armen Alchian put it, “[w]ell-defined and well-protected property rights replace competition by violence with competition by peaceful means.”

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Background…

California’s state Assembly earlier this year passed A.B. 2408, which would impose a duty of care on social-media platforms for “any design, feature, or affordance that causes a child user… to become addicted to the platform.” The bill,  which has also cleared the state Senate Judiciary Committee, would empower parents to bring class-action suits against Big Tech platforms, with minimum statutory damages set at $1,000 per class member. California prosecutors also could seek damages of $25,000 per violation, or $250,000 for knowing and willful violations. Liability would attach when a platform becomes aware that an algorithm is potentially addictive.

But…

Not only is the theory of social-media addiction strongly contested, but it would be difficult, if not unconstitutional, to enforce the bill’s terms. The line differentiating fomenting user addiction and making a platform more attractive to users is exceedingly blurry. Moreover, a strong case can be made that A.B. 2408 violates the First Amendment.

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Abstract

Using hazard analysis, we study whether various physician characteristics, including prior paid claim history, gender, specialty, years of experience, type of degree (M.D. versus D.O.), country of medical school attendance (U.S. versus non-U.S.), and gender) predict future paid medical malpractice (“med mal”) claims, using detailed data on all licensed physicians and all paid claims in Illinois over a 25-year period. This level of granularity is not available using national data. After controlling for other factors, physicians with a single prior paid claim have a four-fold higher risk of future claims than physicians with zero prior paid claims. Male gender, attending a non-U.S. medical school, and practicing in a high-malpractice-risk specialty all predict higher paid claim risk. Paid claim risk is also higher for physicians with 6-15 prior years of experience than for those who are either earlier or later in their careers. We find having an M.D. (rather than a D.O.) is associated with higher paid claim risk, but only in our multiple-failure models.

Abstract

In social change contexts such as conservation or public health, marketing can communicate information, nudge people toward more socially aligned behavior, or encourage adoption of long-run solutions that permanently shift personal outcomes and/or social spillovers. These marketing options, if effective, can substitute for regulatory change to address the respective social issue. In this paper, we focus on California’s drought response, where cease and desist orders and community level fines are contingent on the effectiveness of local level voluntary change. We illustrate that a marketing challenge for the favored voluntary conservation approach of turf removal is that it ignores the preference trade-offs of those who consume the most and/or are least motivated by the social objective of conservation. We conduct sequential randomized control trials to evaluate the marketing and effectiveness of an Internet of Things (IOT) irrigation controller that helps consumers more efficiently irrigate and grow their lawns. We find that our marketing interventions for this “preference aligned” solution have higher response rates among heavy irrigators who would not otherwise conserve. Rather than cannibalizing other solutions with greater potential water savings, as some conservationists worry, our interventions lead to large persistent reductions in water usage.

In over a century of existence, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been a policy leader in developing American thinking about and in enforcing antitrust and consumer protection laws pursuant to several specific statutory mandates. It has also promulgated a substantial number of consumer protection rules, dealing with a wide variety of practices. It has almost never, however, enacted substantive rules seeking to regulate specified forms of business conduct that affect competition in the marketplace.

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Executive Summary

Intermediaries may not be the consumer welfare hero we want, but more often than not, they are one that we need. Policymakers often assume that intermediaries and centralization serve as a cost to society, and that consumers are better off when provided with “more choice.” Concrete expression of this view can be found in regulatory initiatives that aim to turn “closed” platforms into “open” ones (see, in Europe, the Digital Markets Act; and in the United States, the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act). Against this backdrop, we explain that, as with all economic goods, intermediation involves tradeoffs. Intermediaries emerge when it would otherwise be too difficult (or too costly) for groups of users to meet and interact. There is thus no guarantee that government-mandated disintermediation — such as that contemplated in the European DMA and the U.S. AICOA bill — will generate net benefits in a given case. The ongoing Epic v Apple proceedings are a good example of why it is important to respect the role of intermediaries in digital markets, and the unique benefits intermediation can bring to consumers. The upshot is that intermediaries are far more valuable than they are usually given credit for.

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ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz joined Steptoe & Johnson’s The Cyberlaw Podcast to discuss the American Data Privacy and Protection Act’s legislative prospects. The full episode is embedded below.

Abstract

In the first quarter of 2022, the Stanford Computational Antitrust project team invited the partnering antitrust agencies to share their advances in implementing computational tools. Here are the results of the survey.

When campaigning for his progressive income tax, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker argued it was needed to address “income inequality” and fund education and social services.

Although voters rejected the tax hike, Pritzker has succeeded in reducing income inequality without it. He did so by driving away the state’s wealthiest person.

Billionaire investor Ken Griffin and his family are moving to Florida.

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