I thought I’d aim my opening post at the question that motivated my interest in this symposium:  is behavioral economics leading us to the end of free markets and the takeover of the regulatory state?

Consider how far we’ve come since the days of “caveat emptor,” when sellers had a legal right to fool and cheat buyers, and consumers were free to be fooled and cheated.

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Behavioral economics: love it or hate it – there seems to be no middle ground. Lovers take the obvious fact people are not frictionless maximizing machines together with the false premise that economists assume that they are to conclude that all of economics must be wrong. The haters take the equally obvious fact that laboratories are not the real world to dismiss all laboratory evidence that conflicts with their pet theories as irrelevant. In the end they seem primarily to talk past each other.

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I have long argued that the economic assumption of rationality is useful not because it is a complete and correct description of real world behavior but because it describes that part of behavior that is predictable. If half the time an individual takes the actions that best achieve his goals and half the time he acts at random, then modeling his behavior as rational with some random error probably does as good a job of predicting it as we can do. When dealing not with a single individual but with the aggregated affects of many individual actions, random actions will tend to cancel out, making the predictions of a rational actor model more accurate than they would be for a single actor. Further, in some but not all cases, the actors that most matter are precisely those selected for successful decisions in the past—successful speculators, for example, have more money to speculate with and so a larger effect on markets, than unsuccessful ones.

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A federal district court judge recently decided an interesting antitrust/ IP case involving “wheel game” slot machines.  IGT sued Bally’s in 2004 for allegedly infringing a number of patents on a “wheel game” slot machine.  Bally’s initially prevailed, winning a pair of summary judgment rulings on the validity of IGT’s patents and refusing to grant summary judgment on Bally’s antitrust counterclaims.

Read the full piece here. 

Today comes news that Senator Kohl has sent a letter to the DOJ urging “careful review” of the proposed Google/ITA merger.  Underlying his concerns (or rather the “concerns raised by a number of industry participants and consumer advocates that I believe warrant careful review”) is this…

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Come check it out.  In addition to the TOTM bloggers, here is the list of confirmed participants (with more TBA …)

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Here we go again.  The European Commission is after Google more formally than a few months ago (but not yet having issued a Statement of Objections).

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The day before yesterday I posted on the fascinating and important TiVo v. EchoStar case.  Today I wanted to follow up with some, let’s say, color commentary on EchoStar’s litigation tactics.  This isn’t dispositive, of course, but it does seem to add some insight into the notion that EchoStar is taking advantage of questionable litigation tactics rather than respecting property rights in its dealings with TiVo.

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We’ve been reading with interest a bit of an blog squabble between Tim Wu and Adam Thierer ( see here and here) set off by Professor Wu’s WSJ column: “In the Grip of the New Monopolists.”  Wu’s column makes some remarkable claims, and, like Adam, we find it extremely troubling.

Read the full piece here.