One topic that has long interested me is the source of dislike or hatred of capitalism; my Southern Economics Journal article “Folk Economics” (ungated version)  dealt in part with this topic. Today’s New York Times has an op-ed, “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths” by William Deresiewicz, who has taught English at Yale and Columbia, that both illustrates and explains this hatred.  What is interesting about this column is that it is entirely about the character and behavior of “the rich” including entrepreneurs.  The job creating function of business is briefly mentioned but most of the article focuses on “fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury.”

What is nowhere mentioned is anything to do with the goods and services produced by business.  This is a common attitude of critics of capitalism.  In many cases, capitalists may suffer the same personality defects as the rest of us.  And, as Mr. Deresiewicz points out, scientists, artists and scholars may also be hard working and smart.  But capitalism does not reward moral worth or hard work.  Capitalism rewards providing stuff  that other people are willing to pay for.  While is is easy to point out the stupidity of the critique (Mr. Deresiewicz has written and seems proud of his book, published by a capitalist publisher and available from various capitalist booksellers) that is not my point.  Rather, this column is interesting in that it is a pristine example of a totally irrelevant critique of capitalism, written by what is a smart person.  He does cite Adam Smith, but seems to misunderstand the basic functioning of markets.  Markets reward what one does, not what one is.

Filed under: business, corporate social responsibility, economics, entrepreneurship, markets, social responsibility

Last week, the FTC hired outside litigator Beth Wilkinson to lead an investigation into Google’s conduct, which some in the press have interpreted as a grave sign for the search company. The FTC is reportedly interested in pursuing Google under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits a firm from engaging in “unfair methods of competition.” Along with Bob Litan, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division during the Microsoft investigation, I have penned a short paper on the FTC’s seemingly unorthodox Section 5 case against Google. (Disclosure: This paper was commissioned by Google.)

Read the full piece here.

The AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation call for papers features a topic near and dear to my heart this year: Google and Antitrust.   Here is the announcement:

Call for Papers Announcement

AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation

Google and Antitrust

2013 AALS Annual Meeting

January 4-7, 2013

New Orleans, Louisiana

The AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation will hold a program on Google and Antitrust during the AALS 2013 Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The program will explore the Federal Trade Commission’s potential antitrust case against Google and the Google Book Search settlement. The program will feature a roundtable panel involving leading scholars who have addressed these issues: Dan Crane (Michigan), Marina Lao (Seton Hall), Frank Pasquale (Seton Hall), and Pam Samuelson (Berkeley). We are looking to add one additional panelist through this Call for Papers.

Submission procedure:

Anyone interested in participating is encouraged to submit a draft paper (preferred, and roughly in the range of 20-40 pages) or proposal by e-mail to Michael A. Carrier, at [email protected] by September 4, 2012.

Eligibility:

Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Faculty at fee-paid law schools; foreign, visiting and adjunct faculty members; graduate students; fellows; and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Papers may already be accepted for publication, as long as the paper will not be published before the AALS meeting.

Registration fee and expenses:

Call-for-Paper participants will be responsible for paying their annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

How will papers be reviewed?

Papers will be reviewed and selected by members of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Antirust and Economic Regulation: Darren Bush (Houston), Michael Carrier (Rutgers-Camden), Daniel Crane (Michigan), Hillary Greene (Connecticut), Scott Hemphill (Columbia), and D. Daniel Sokol (Florida).

Will the program be published in a journal?

Yes, as a symposium in the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Digest.

Deadline date for submission:

September 4, 2012. Decisions will be announced by September 28, 2012.

Program date and time:

Saturday, January 5, 2013, 10:30am – 12:15pm.

Contact for submission and inquires:

Michael A. Carrier

Chair, AALS Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation

Rutgers Law School – Camden
217 North Fifth Street
Camden, NJ 08102
(856) 225-6380
[email protected]

Filed under: antitrust, copyright, economics, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, settlements

The FTC is having a conference in the economics of drip pricing:

Drip pricing is a pricing technique in which firms advertise only part of a product’s price and reveal other charges later as the customer goes through the buying process. The additional charges can be mandatory charges, such as hotel resort fees, or fees for optional upgrades and add-ons. Drip pricing is used by many types of firms, including internet sellers, automobile dealers, financial institutions, and rental car companies.

Economists and marketing academics will be brought together to examine the theoretical motivation for drip pricing and its impact on consumers, empirical studies, and policy issues pertaining to drip pricing. The sessions will address the following questions: Why do firms engage in drip pricing? How does drip pricing affect consumer search? Where does drip pricing occur? When is drip pricing harmful? Are there efficiency justifications for the practice in some situations? Can competition prevent firms from harming consumers through drip pricing? Can consumer experience or firm reputation limit harm from drip pricing? What types of policies could lead to improved consumer decision making and under what circumstances should such policies be applied?

The workshop, which will be free and open to the public, will be held at the FTC’s Conference Center, located at 601 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC. A government-issued photo ID is required for entry. Pre-registration for this workshop is not necessary, but is encouraged, so that we may better plan for the event.

Here is the conference agenda:

Filed under: antitrust, behavioral economics, economics, federal trade commission, price discrimination, truth on the market

In the past weeks, the chatter surrounding a possible FTC antitrust case against Google has risen in volume, thanks largely to the FTC’s hiring of litigator Beth Wilkinson.  The question remains, however, what this aggressive move portends and, more importantly, why the FTC is taking it.

Read the full piece here. 

Catching up on my blog reading, I see Chillin’ Competition had a Friday Slot interview with Damien Geradin recently, as well.  Also worth checking out.  I especially like this:

What you like the least about economics in competition law?

Mind boggling theories disconnected from the real world. These are a complete waste of time.

Amen, Brother!

Filed under: antitrust, musings Tagged: Damien Geradin

Our friends at Chillin’ Competition have a short interview with Herb Hovenkamp up as part of their “Friday Slot” series.  Here are a couple of tidbits to entice you to go read the whole thing:

“Oscar” of the best antitrust law book? Non-antitrust book?

Best Antitrust Book:  Oliver E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications (1975).

Best non-antitrust book:  Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001)

* * *

Let’s do it like economists => assume that you could change 3 rules, principles, judgments, institutions in the current EU antitrust system. What would you do? 

Answer: I would speak only to the United States system, where I would change the following three things:

A.  The per se rule against tying arrangements (insofar as it still exists)

B.  The strict recoupment requirement in predatory pricing cases when prices are clearly below average variable cost

C.  The federal courts’ repeated refusal to see the competitive harm in reverse payment settlements in pharmaceutical infringement cases

* * *

A piece of “counterfactual” analysis: what would you do if you weren’t in your current position?

I would be either a Dutch Reformed clergyman or a Professor of American History

* * *

Favorite movies?

Sappy chickflicks: The Notebook, Sleepless in Seattle, Titanic

Filed under: antitrust, film, musings Tagged: herbert hovenkamp

I’ve posted to SSRN an article written for the Antitrust Law Journal symposium on the Neo-Chicago School of Antitrust.  The article is entitled “Abandoning Chicago’s Antitrust Obsession: The Case for Evidence-Based Antitrust,” and focuses upon what I believe to be a central obstacle to the continued evolution of sensible antitrust rules in the courts and agencies: the dramatic proliferation of economic theories which could be used to explain antitrust-relevant business conduct. That proliferation has given rise to a need for a commitment to develop sensible criteria for selecting among these theories; a commitment not present in modern antitrust institutions.  I refer to this as the “model selection problem,” describe how reliance upon shorthand labels and descriptions of the various “Chicago Schools” have distracted from the development of solutions to this problem, and raise a number of promising approaches to embedding a more serious commitment to empirical testing within modern antitrust.

Here is the abstract.

The antitrust community retains something of an inconsistent attitude towards evidence-based antitrust.  Commentators, judges, and scholars remain supportive of evidence-based antitrust, even vocally so; nevertheless, antitrust scholarship and policy discourse continues to press forward advocating the use of one theory over another as applied in a specific case, or one school over another with respect to the class of models that should inform the structure of antitrust’s rules and presumptions, without tethering those questions to an empirical benchmark.  This is a fundamental challenge facing modern antitrust institutions, one that I call the “model selection problem.”  The three goals of this article are to describe the model selection problem, to demonstrate that the intense focus upon so-called schools within the antitrust community has exacerbated the problem, and to offer a modest proposal to help solve the model selection problem.  This proposal has two major components: abandonment of terms like “Chicago School,” “Neo-Chicago School,” and “Post-Chicago School,” and replacement of those terms with a commitment to testing economic theories with economic knowledge and empirical data to support those theories with the best predictive power.  I call this approach “evidence-based antitrust.”  I conclude by discussing several promising approaches to embedding an appreciation for empirical testing more deeply within antitrust institutions.

I would refer interested readers to the work of my colleagues Tim Muris and Bruce Kobayashi (also prepared for the Antitrust L.J. symposium) Chicago, Post-Chicago, and Beyond: Time to Let Go of the 20th Century, which also focuses upon similar themes.

Filed under: antitrust, barriers to entry, behavioral economics, economics, legal scholarship, scholarship

My work (with GMU 3L Angela Diveley) featured on the University of Pennsylvania’s RegBlog.  An excerpt:

The comparison we conducted is one between institutions – the FTC and the federal judicial system – and not individual judges and commissioners. There is no doubt the antitrust and economic experts at the FTC are well equipped to analyze all modes of business dealings; in this sense, agencies certainly have greater economic expertise than courts as a general rule. However, like the FTC, courts incorporate economic expertise into their decision-making. While the FTC seeks to incorporate its staff’s expertise, courts seek to incorporate the expertise of expert witnesses. Both institutions are organizations with complex internal structures with different modes of transmitting economic expertise into decision-making outputs and different constraints and incentives.

We sought to determine whether the FTC’s institutional structure facilitates the transmission of economic inputs into its adjudicatory decisions more effectively than Article III judges in similar cases. The implicit assumption underlying the expertise hypothesis, and many of the calls for increased delegation to the agencies, is that they are better equipped to convert that expertise to litigation outcomes. If agencies do not hold such an advantage in converting expertise to outputs, interesting and important questions are raised concerning the optimal institutional design of the FTC and of administrative agencies generally. Our preliminary evidence suggests precisely this outcome as we find no advantage for administrative agencies.

Filed under: antitrust, economics, federal trade commission