Search Results

My inaugural blog on two-sided markets did not elicit much reaction from TOTM readers. Perhaps it was too boring. In a desperate attempt to generate a hostile comment from at least one housing advocate, I have decided to advocate bulldozing homes in foreclosure as one (of several) means to relieve the housing crisis. Not with families inside them, of course. In my mind, the central problem of U.S. housing markets is the misallocation of land: Thanks to the housing boom, there are too many houses and not enough greenery. And bulldozers are the fastest way to convert unwanted homes into parks.

Read the full piece here.

Economists have long warned against price regulation in the context of network industries, but until now our tools have been limited to complex theoretical models. Last week, the heavens sent down a natural experiment so powerful that the theoretical models are blushing: In response to a new regulation preventing banks from charging debit-card swipe fees to merchants, Bank of America announced that it would charge its customers $5 a month for debit card purchases. And Chase and Wells Fargo are testing $3 monthly debit-card fees in certain markets. In case you haven’t been following the action, the basic details are here. What in the world does this development have to do with an “open” Internet? A lot, actually.

Read the full piece here.

[I am participating in an online “debate” at the American Constitution Society with Professor Ben Edelman.  The debate consists of an opening statement and concluding responses to be posted later in the week.  Professor Edelman’s opening statement is here.  I am cross-posting my opening statement here at TOTM.  This is my closing statement]

Professor Edelman’s opening post does little to support his case.  Instead, it reflects the same retrograde antitrust I criticized in my first post.

Edelman’s understanding of antitrust law and economics appears firmly rooted in the 1960s approach to antitrust in which enforcement agencies, courts, and economists vigorously attacked novel business arrangements without regard to their impact on consumers.  Judge Learned Hand’s infamous passage in the Alcoa decision comes to mind as an exemplar of antitrust’s bad old days when the antitrust laws demanded that successful firms forego opportunities to satisfy consumer demand.  Hand wrote:

we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel.

Antitrust has come a long way since then.  By way of contrast, today’s antitrust analysis of alleged exclusionary conduct begins with (ironically enough) the U.S. v. Microsoft decision.  Microsoft emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing effective competition from exclusionary conduct; but it also firmly places “consumer welfare” as the lodestar of the modern approach to antitrust:

Whether any particular act of a monopolist is exclusionary, rather than merely a form of vigorous competition, can be difficult to discern: the means of illicit exclusion, like the means of legitimate competition, are myriad.  The challenge for an antitrust court lies in stating a general rule for distinguishing between exclusionary acts, which reduce social welfare, and competitive acts, which increase it.  From a century of case law on monopolization under § 2, however, several principles do emerge.  First, to be condemned as exclusionary, a monopolist’s act must have an “anticompetitive effect.”  That is, it must harm the competitive process and thereby harm consumers.  In contrast, harm to one or more competitors will not suffice.

Nearly all antitrust commentators agree that the shift to consumer-welfare focused analysis has been a boon for consumers.  Unfortunately, Edelman’s analysis consists largely of complaints that would have satisfied courts and agencies in the 1960s but would not do so now that the focus has turned to consumer welfare rather than indirect complaints about market structure or the fortunes of individual rivals.

From the start, in laying out his basic case against Google, Edelman invokes antitrust concepts that are simply inapt for the facts and then goes on to apply them in a manner inconsistent with the modern consumer-welfare-oriented framework described above:

In antitrust parlance, this is tying: A user who wants only Google Search, but not Google’s other services, will be disappointed.  Instead, any user who wants Google Search is forced to receive Google’s other services too.  Google’s approach also forecloses competition: Other sites cannot compete on their merits for a substantial portion of the market – consumers who use Google to find information – because Google has kept those consumers for itself.

There are two significant errors here.  First, Edelman claims to be interested in protecting users who want only Google Search but not its other services will be disappointed.  I have no doubt such consumers exist.  Some proof that they exist is that a service has already been developed to serve them.  Professor Edelman, meet Googleminusgoogle.com.  Across the top the page reads: “Search with Google without getting results from Google sites such as Knol, Blogger and YouTube.”  In antitrust parlance, this is not tying after all.  The critical point, however, is that user preferences are being satisfied as one would expect to arise from competition.

The second error, as I noted in my first post, is to condemn vertical integration as inherently anticompetitive.  It is here that the retrograde character of Professor Edelman’s analysis (and other critics of Google, to be fair) shines brightest.  It reflects a true disconnect between the 1960s approach to antitrust which focused exclusively upon market structure and impact upon rival websites; impact upon consumers was nowhere to be found.  That Google not only produces search results but also owns some of the results that are searched is not a problem cognizable by modern antitrust.  Edelman himself—appropriately—describes Google and its competitors as “information services.”  Google is not merely a URL finder.  Consumers demand more than that and competition forces search engines to deliver.  It offers value to users (and thus it can offer users to advertisers) by helping them find information in increasingly useful ways.  Most users “want Google Search” to the exclusion of Google’s “other services” (and, if they do, all they need do is navigate over to http://googleminusgoogle.com/ (even in a Chrome browser) and they can have exactly that).  But the critical point is that Google’s “other services” are methods of presenting information to consumers, just like search.  As the web and its users have evolved, and as Google has innovated to keep up with the evolving demands of consumers, it has devised or employed other means than simply providing links to a set of URLs to provide the most relevant information to its users.  The 1960s approach to antitrust condemns this as anticompetitive foreclosure; the modern version recognizes it as innovation, a form of competition that benefits consumers.

Edelman (and other critics, including a number of Senators at last month’s hearing) hearken back to the good old days and suggest that any deviation from Google’s technology or business model of the past is an indication of anticompetitive conduct:

The Google of 2004 promised to help users “leave its website as quickly as possible” while showing, initially, zero ads.  But times have changed.  Google has modified its site design to encourage users to linger on other Google properties, even when competing services have more or better information.  And Google now shows as many fourteen ads on a page.

It is hard to take seriously an argument that turns on criticizing a company simply for looking different than it did seven years ago.  Does anybody remember what search results looked like 7 years ago?  A theory of antitrust liability that would condemn a firm for investing billions of dollars in research and product development, constantly evolving its product to meet consumer demand, taking advantage of new technology, and developing its business model to increase profitability should not be taken seriously.  This is particularly true where, as here, every firm in the industry has followed a similar course, adopting the same or similar innovations.  I encourage readers to try a few queries on http://www.bing-vs-google.com/– where you can get side by side comparisons – in order to test whether the evolution of search results and innovation to meet consumer preferences is really a Google-specific thing or an industry wide phenomenon consistent with competition.  Conventional antitrust analysis holds that when conduct is engaged in not only by allegedly dominant firms, but also by every other firm in an industry, that conduct is presumptively efficient, not anticompetitive.

The main thrust of my critique is that Edelman and other Google critics rely on an outdated antitrust framework in which consumers play little or no role.  Rather than a consumer-welfare based economic critique consistent with the modern approach, these critics (as Edelman does in his opening statement) turn to a collection of anecdotes and “gotcha” statements from company executives.  It is worth correcting a few of those items here, although when we’ve reached the point where identifying a firm’s alleged abuse is a function of defining what a “confirmed” fax is, we’ve probably reached the point of decreasing marginal returns.  Rest assured that a series of (largely inaccurate) anecdotes about Google’s treatment of particular websites or insignificant contract terms is wholly insufficient to meet the standard of proof required to make a case against the company under the Sherman Act or even the looser Federal Trade Commission Act.

• It appears to be completely inaccurate to say that “[a]n unsatisfied advertiser must complain to Google by ‘first class mail or air mail or overnight courier’ with a copy by ‘confirmed facsimile.’”  A quick search, even on Bing, leads one to this page, indicating that complaints may be submitted via web form.
• It is likewise inaccurate to claim that “advertisers are compelled to accept whatever terms Google chooses to impose.  For example, an advertiser seeking placement through Google’s premium Search Network partners (like AOL and The New York Times) must also accept placement through the entire Google Search Network which includes all manner . . . undesirable placements.”  In actuality, Google offers a “Site and Category Exclusion Tool” that seems to permit advertisers to tailor their placements to exclude exactly these “undesirable placements.”
• “Meanwhile, a user searching for restaurants, hotels, or other local merchants sees Google Places results with similar prominence, pushing other information services to locations users are unlikely to notice.”  I have strived in vain to enter a search for a restaurant, hotel, or the like into Google that yielded results that effectively hid “other information services” from my notice, but for some of my searches, Google Places did come up first or second (and for others it showed up further down the page).
• Edelman has noted elsewhere that, sometimes, for some of the searches he has tested, the most popular result on Google (as well, I should add, on other, non-“dominant” sites) is not the first, Google-owned result, but instead the second.  He cites this as evidence that Google is cooking the books, favoring its own properties when users actually prefer another option.  It actually doesn’t demonstrate that, but let’s accept the claim for the sake of argument.  Notice what his example also demonstrates: that users who prefer the second result to the first are perfectly capable of finding it and clicking on it.  If this is foreclosure, Google is exceptionally bad at it.

The crux of Edelman’s complaint seems to be that Google is competing in ways that respond to consumer preferences.  This is precisely what antitrust seeks to encourage, and we would not want a set of standards that chilled competition because of a competitor’s success.  Having been remarkably successful in serving consumers’ search demands in a quickly evolving market, it would be perverse for the antitrust laws to then turn upon Google without serious evidence that it had, in fact, actually harmed consumers.

Untethered from consumer welfare analysis, antitrust threatens to re-orient itself to the days when it was used primarily as a weapon against rivals and thus imposed a costly tax on consumers.  It is perhaps telling that Microsoft, Expedia, and a few other Google competitors are the primary movers behind the effort to convict the company.  But modern antitrust, shunning its inglorious past, requires actual evidence of anticompetitive effect before condemning conduct, particularly in fast-moving, innovative industries.  Neither Edelman nor any of Google’s other critics, offer any.

During the heady days of the Microsoft antitrust case, the big question was whether modern antitrust would be able to keep up with quickly evolving markets.  The treatment of the proferred case against Google is an important test of the proposition (endorsed by the Antitrust Modernization Commission and others) that today’s antitrust is capable of consistent and coherent application in innovative, high-tech markets.  An enormous amount is at stake.  Faced with the high stakes and ever-evolving novelty of high-tech markets, antitrust will only meet this expectation if it remains grounded and focused on the core principle of competitive effects and consumer harm.  Without it, antitrust will devolve back into the laughable and anti-consumer state of affairs of the 1960s—and we will all pay for it.

Filed under: antitrust, consumer protection, economics, error costs, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, google, monopolization, technology, tying

Here’s Professor Zywicki in the WSJ on the debit card interchange price controls going into effect, and their unintended but entirely predictable consequences:

Faced with a dramatic cut in revenues (estimated to be $6.6 billion by Javelin Strategy & Research, a global financial services consultancy), banks have already imposed new monthly maintenance fees—usually from $36 to $60 per year—on standard checking and debit-card accounts, as well as new or higher fees on particular bank services. While wealthier consumers have avoided many of these new fees—for example, by maintaining a sufficiently high minimum balance—a Bankrate survey released this week reported that only 45% of traditional checking accounts are free, down from 75% in two years.

Some consumers who previously banked for free will be unable or unwilling to pay these fees merely for the privilege of a bank account. As many as one million individuals will drop out of the mainstream banking system and turn to check cashers, pawn shops and high-fee prepaid cards, according to an estimate earlier this year by economists David Evans, Robert Litan and Richard Schmalensee. (Their study was supported by banks.)

Consumers will also be encouraged to shift from debit cards to more profitable alternatives such as credit cards, which remain outside the Durbin amendment’s price controls. According to news reports, Bank of America has made a concerted effort to shift customers from debit to credit cards, including plans to charge a $5 monthly fee for debit-card purchases. Citibank has increased its direct mail efforts to recruit new credit card customers frustrated by the increased cost and decreased benefits of debit cards.

This substitution will offset the hemorrhaging of debit-card revenues for banks. But it is also likely to eat into the financial windfall expected by big box retailers and their lobbyists. They likely will return to Washington seeking to extend price controls to credit cards. …

Todd closes with a nice point about where the impact of these regulations will be felt most:

Conceived of as a narrow special-interest giveaway to large retailers, the Durbin amendment will have long-term consequences for the consumer banking system. Wealthier consumers will be able to avoid the pinch of higher banking fees by increasing their use of credit cards. Many low-income consumers will not.

Read the whole thing.

 

Filed under: banking, business, consumer protection, credit cards, economics

There is a Missouri statute that makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by $100 fine, for anyone who is not licensed by the Missouri bar to “engage in the practice of law or do law business.”  If convicted, violators can be sued by anyone that paid them for their services or by the state of Missouri; successful plaintiffs can recover three times the fees paid to the violator for their services.

Read the full piece here.

The European Commission, in particular the Directorate-General for Competition, has shown interest in promoting competition in the market for legal services since the early 2000s.

Some countries such as the United Kingdom have taken this matter seriously. After a long review process, the British government has recently implemented a new regulatory set-up for legal services in order to foster competition, innovation, consumer protection as well as a so-called accountable regulatory enforcement (under the Legal Services Act 2007).

Read the full piece here.

Although it has the zing of a slogan that I myself have often used, the call to ‘deregulate’ the legal profession is misleading.  Yes, most of us who argue that the legal profession is excessively closed to competition—in a way that hampers both access and innovation, as I have argued in recent papers—think that the entry barriers are too high.  But the legal profession is not only over-regulated, it is also under-regulated.  The regulatory regime lawyers and judges have put in place is overly protective of lawyers’ interests and insufficiently protective of the public’s interest in an accessible, innovative, and efficient legal system.  So the goal should not be ‘deregulation’ but ‘right-regulation.’

Read the full piece here.

Richard Cordray’s nomination hearing provided an opportunity to learn something new about the substantive policies of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Unfortunately, that opportunity came and went without answering many of the key questions that remain concerning the impact of the CFPB’s enforcement and regulatory agenda on the availability of consumer credit, economic growth, and jobs.

Read the full piece here. 

There has been plenty of Hurricane Irene blogging, and some posts linking natural disasters to various aspects of law and policy (see, e.g. my colleague Ilya Somin discussing property rights and falling trees).   Often, post-natural disaster economic discussion at TOTM turns to the perverse consequences of price gouging laws.  This time around, the damage from the hurricane got me thinking about the issue of availability of credit.  In policy debates in and around the new CFPB and its likely agenda — which is often reported to include restrictions on payday lending — I often take up the unpopular (at least in the rooms in which these debates often occur) position that while payday lenders can abuse consumers, one should think very carefully about incentives before going about restricting access to any form of consumer credit.  In the case of payday lending, for example, proponents of restrictions or outright bans generally have in mind a counterfactual world in which consumers who are choosing payday loans are simply “missing out” on other forms of credit with superior terms.  Often, proponents of this position rely upon a theory involving particular behavioral biases of at least some substantial fraction of borrowers who, for example, over estimate their future ability to pay off the loan.  Skeptics of government-imposed restrictions on access to consumer credit (whether it be credit cards or payday lending) often argue that such restrictions do not change the underlying demand for consumer credit.  Consumer demand for credit — whether for consumption smoothing purposes or in response to a natural disaster or personal income “shock” or another reason — is an important lubricant for economic growth.  Restrictions do not reduce this demand at all — in fact, critics of these restrictions point out, consumers are likely to switch to the closest substitute forms of credit available to them if access to one source is foreclosed.  Of course, these stories are not necessarily mutually exclusive: that is, some payday loan customers might irrationally use payday lending while better options are available while at the same time, it is the best source of credit available to other customers.

In any event, one important testable implication for the economic theories of payday lending relied upon by critics of such restrictions (including myself) is that restrictions on their use will have a negative impact on access to credit for payday lending customers (i.e. they will not be able to simply turn to better sources of credit).  While most critics of government restrictions on access to consumer credit appear to recognize the potential for abuse and favor disclosure regimes and significant efforts to police and punish fraud, the idea that payday loans might generate serious economic benefits for society often appears repugnant to supporters.  All of this takes me to an excellent paper that lies at the intersection of these two issues: natural disasters and the economic effects of restrictions on payday lending.  The paper is Adair Morse’s Payday Lenders: Heroes or Villians.    From the abstract:

I ask whether access to high-interest credit (payday loans) exacerbates or mitigates individual financial distress. Using natural disasters as an exogenous shock, I apply a propensity score matched, triple difference specification to identify a causal relationship between access-to-credit and welfare. I find that California foreclosures increase by 4.5 units per 1,000 homes in the year after a natural disaster, but the existence of payday lenders mitigates 1.0-1.3 of these foreclosures. In a placebo test for natural disasters covered by homeowner insurance, I find no payday lending mitigation effect. Lenders also mitigate larcenies, but have no effect on burglaries or vehicle thefts. My methodology demonstrates that my results apply to ordinary personal emergencies, with the caveat that not all payday loan customers borrow for emergencies.

To be sure, there are other papers with different designs that identify economic benefits from payday lending and other otherwise “disfavored” credit products.  Similarly, there papers out there that use different data and a variety of research designs and identify social harms from payday lending (see here for links to a handful, and here for a recent attempt).  A literature survey is available here.  Nonetheless, Morse’s results remind me that consumer credit institutions — even non-traditional ones — can generate serious economic benefits in times of need and policy analysts must be careful in evaluating and weighing those benefits against potential costs when thinking about and designing restrictions that will change incentives in consumer credit markets.

Filed under: behavioral economics, behavioral economics, consumer financial protection bureau, consumer protection, contracts, cost-benefit analysis, credit cards, economics, regulation