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TOTM What is most surprising about the GAO report is how little the analytical discussion of this subject has advanced in the last decade. We all . . .
What is most surprising about the GAO report is how little the analytical discussion of this subject has advanced in the last decade. We all know that interchange rates might contribute to higher retail prices: customers that use cheaper payment products can be said to “subsidize” customers that use credit cards. Starting with the Australian initiative, regulators for a decade have sought to understand the costs of credit-card processing and to push interchange fees down to the “competitive” level of the “costs” of providing the service. Conversely, economists writing about two-sided networks have shown that the focus on costs reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the two-sided network, in which the interchange fee is an allocation of burden between merchants and cardholders, not a charge for services rendered to one side or the other.
Read the full piece here.
Presentations & Interviews Last June, Christine Varney, then a lawyer in private practice, now President Obama’s nominee to be the next Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, warned that . . .
Last June, Christine Varney, then a lawyer in private practice, now President Obama’s nominee to be the next Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, warned that Google, not Microsoft, is the monopolist of the future. “For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem — potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.” Concerns of this nature ultimately led Tom Barnett, the last Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, to threaten a Sherman Act monopolization lawsuit if Google went through with plans to buy Yahoo. Google, on the other hand, contends that the concerns are completely misplaced. “The nature of the Internet is just a fundamentally different world from the sale of packaged software or the bundling of software with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers),” according to Kent Walker, Google’s General Counsel. “The standard line we have is that competition is just one click away.”
Panelists:
Full audio is embedded below.
TOTM Apparently the Obama administration is not very confident about getting its environmental climate change agenda passed through Congress. Given a legislative “solution” is off the . . .
Apparently the Obama administration is not very confident about getting its environmental climate change agenda passed through Congress. Given a legislative “solution” is off the table, at least for the foreseeable future, perhaps it is not surprising that today the EPA announced it’s ruling that greenhouse gases are “a danger to public health and welfare“.
Presentations & Interviews Last June, Christine Varney, then a lawyer in private practice, now President Obama's nominee to be the next Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, warned that Google, not Microsoft, is the monopolist of the future.
Last June, Christine Varney, then a lawyer in private practice, now President Obama’s nominee to be the next Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, warned that Google, not Microsoft, is the monopolist of the future.
“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem — potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.” Concerns of this nature ultimately led Tom Barnett, the last Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, to threaten a Sherman Act monopolization lawsuit if Google went through with plans to buy Yahoo.
Google, on the other hand, contends that the concerns are completely misplaced. “The nature of the Internet is just a fundamentally different world from the sale of packaged software or the bundling of software with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers),” according to Kent Walker, Google’s General Counsel. “The standard line we have is that competition is just one click away.
TOTM Here’s Henry Waxman on the federal government saving the newspapers from failing… Read the full piece here.
Here’s Henry Waxman on the federal government saving the newspapers from failing…
TOTM From Larry Ribstein: A few years later, Henry Butler and I wrote a book decrying SOX, and discussing the evidence that was accumulating against it, . . .
From Larry Ribstein:
A few years later, Henry Butler and I wrote a book decrying SOX, and discussing the evidence that was accumulating against it, as well as the SOX suit. Here’s an excerpt from the book abstract…
TOTM Well, you probably know my answer to that one. I was interested to read Fred von Lohmann’s short take on the privacy aspects of the . . .
Well, you probably know my answer to that one.
I was interested to read Fred von Lohmann’s short take on the privacy aspects of the Google Books Settlement, available here.
TOTM And now for something completely different. Being the only non-lawyer economist in the group seems to warrant such a preface sometimes. Read the full piece . . .
And now for something completely different. Being the only non-lawyer economist in the group seems to warrant such a preface sometimes.
TOTM My latest working paper, which bears the same title as this post, is now available on SSRN. In the paper, I address the challenge created . . .
My latest working paper, which bears the same title as this post, is now available on SSRN. In the paper, I address the challenge created by the Supreme Court’s 2007 Leegin decision, which abrogated the 96 year-old rule declaring resale price maintenance (RPM) to be per se illegal. The Leegin Court held that instances of RPM must instead be evaluated under antitrust’s more lenient rule of reason. It also directed lower courts to craft a structured liability analysis for separating pro- from anticompetitive instances of the practice.
