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As everyone knows by now, AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile has hit a bureaucratic snag at the FCC.  The remarkable decision to refer the merger to the Commission’s Administrative Law Judge (in an effort to derail the deal) and the public release of the FCC staff’s internal, draft report are problematic and poorly considered.  But far worse is the content of the report on which the decision to attempt to kill the deal was based.

With this report the FCC staff joins the exalted company of AT&T’s complaining competitors (surely the least reliable judges of the desirability of the proposed merger if ever there were any) and the antitrust policy scolds and consumer “advocates” who, quite literally, have never met a merger of which they approved.

In this post I’m going to hit a few of the most glaring problems in the staff’s report, and I hope to return again soon with further analysis.

As it happens, AT&T’s own response to the report is actually very good and it effectively highlights many of the key problems with the staff’s report.  While it might make sense to take AT&T’s own reply with a grain of salt, in this case the reply is, if anything, too tame.  No doubt the company wants to keep in the Commission’s good graces (it is the very definition of a repeat player at the agency, after all).  But I am not so constrained.  Using the company’s reply as a jumping off point, let me discuss a few of the problems with the staff report.

First, as the blog post (written by Jim Cicconi, Senior Vice President of External & Legislative Affairs) notes,

We expected that the AT&T-T-Mobile transaction would receive careful, considered, and fair analysis.   Unfortunately, the preliminary FCC Staff Analysis offers none of that.  The document is so obviously one-sided that any fair-minded person reading it is left with the clear impression that it is an advocacy piece, and not a considered analysis.

In our view, the report raises questions as to whether its authors were predisposed.  The report cherry-picks facts to support its views, and ignores facts that don’t.  Where facts were lacking, the report speculates, with no basis, and then treats its own speculations as if they were fact.  This is clearly not the fair and objective analysis to which any party is entitled, and which we have every right to expect.

OK, maybe they aren’t pulling punches.  The fact that this reply was written with such scathing language despite AT&T’s expectation to have to go right back to the FCC to get approval for this deal in some form or another itself speaks volumes about the undeniable shoddiness of the report.

Cicconi goes on to detail five areas where AT&T thinks the report went seriously awry:  “Expanding LTE to 97% of the U.S. Population,” “Job Gains Versus Losses,” “Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s Parent, Has Serious Investment Constraints,” “Spectrum” and “Competition.”  I have dealt with a few of these issues at some length elsewhere, including most notably here (noting how the FCC’s own wireless competition report “supports what everyone already knows: falling prices, improved quality, dynamic competition and unflagging innovation have led to a golden age of mobile services”), and here (“It is troubling that critics–particularly those with little if any business experience–are so certain that even with no obvious source of additional spectrum suitable for LTE coming from the government any time soon, and even with exponential growth in broadband (including mobile) data use, AT&T’s current spectrum holdings are sufficient to satisfy its business plans”).

What is really galling about the staff report—and, frankly, the basic posture of the agency—is that its criticisms really boil down to one thing:  “We believe there is another way to accomplish (something like) what AT&T wants to do here, and we’d just prefer they do it that way.”  This is central planning at its most repugnant.  What is both assumed and what is lacking in this basic posture is beyond the pale for an allegedly independent government agency—and as Larry Downes notes in the linked article, the agency’s hubris and its politics may have real, costly consequences for all of us.

Competition

But procedure must be followed, and the staff thus musters a technical defense to support its basic position, starting with the claim that the merger will result in too much concentration.  Blinded by its new-found love for HHIs, the staff commits a few blunders.  First, it claims that concentration levels like those in this case “trigger a presumption of harm” to competition, citing the DOJ/FTC Merger Guidelines.  Alas, as even the report’s own footnotes reveal, the Merger Guidelines actually say that highly concentrated markets with HHI increases of 200 or more trigger a presumption that the merger will “enhance market power.”  This is not, in fact, the same thing as harm to competition.  Elsewhere the staff calls this—a merger that increases concentration and gives one firm an “undue” share of the market—“presumptively illegal.”  Perhaps the staff could use an antitrust refresher course.  I’d be happy to come teach it.

Not only is there no actual evidence of consumer harm resulting from the sort of increases in concentration that might result from the merger, but the staff seems to derive its negative conclusions despite the damning fact that the data shows that wireless markets have seen considerable increases in concentration along with considerable decreases in prices, rather than harm to competition, over the last decade.  While high and increasing HHIs might indicate a need for further investigation, when actual evidence refutes the connection between concentration and price, they simply lose their relevance.  Someone should tell the FCC staff.

This is a different Wireless Bureau than the one that wrote so much sensible material in the 15^th Annual Wireless Competition Report.  That Bureau described a complex, dynamic, robust mobile “ecosystem” driven not by carrier market power and industrial structure, but by rapid evolution and technological disruptors.  The analysis here wishes away every important factor that every consumer knows to be the real drivers of price and innovation in the mobile marketplace, including, among other things:

1. Local markets, where there are five, six, or more carriers to choose from;
2. Non-contract/pre-paid providers, whose strength is rapidly growing;
3. Technology that is making more bands of available spectrum useful for competitive offerings;
4. The reality that LTE will make inter-modal competition a reality; and
5. The reality that churn is rampant and consumer decision-making is driven today by devices, operating systems, applications and content – not networks.

The resulting analysis is stilted and stale, and describes a wireless industry that exists only in the agency’s collective imagination.

There is considerably more to say about the report’s tortured unilateral effects analysis, but it will have to wait for my next post.  Here I want to quickly touch on a two of the other issues called out by Cicconi’s blog post.

Jobs

First, although it’s not really in my bailiwick to comment on the job claims that have been such an important aspect of the public conversations surrounding this merger, some things are simple logic, and the staff’s contrary claims here are inscrutable.  As Cicconi suggests, it is hard to understand how the $8 billion investment and build-out required to capitalize on AT&T’s T-Mobile purchase will fail to produce a host of jobs, how the creation of a more-robust, faster broadband network will fail to ignite even further growth in this growing sector of the economy, and, finally, how all this can fail to happen while the FCC’s own (relatively) paltry $4.5 billion broadband fund will somehow nevertheless create approximately 500,000 (!!!) jobs.  Even Paul Krugman knows that private investment is better than government investment in generating stimulus – the claim is that there’s not enough of it, not that it doesn’t work as well.  Here, however, the fiscal experts on the FCC’s staff have determined that massive private funding won’t create even 96,000 jobs, although the same agency claims that government funding only one half as large will create five times that many jobs.  Um, really?

Meanwhile the agency simply dismisses AT&T’s job preservation commitments.  Now, I would also normally disregard such unenforceable pronouncements as cheap talk – except given the frequency and the volume with which AT&T has made them, they would suffer pretty mightily for failing to follow through on them now.  Even more important perhaps, I have to believe (again, given the vehemence with which they have made the statements and the reality of de facto, reputational enforcement) they are willing to agree to whatever is in their control in a consent decree, thus making them, in fact, legally enforceable.  For the staff to so blithely disregard AT&T’s claims on jobs is unintelligible except as farce—or venality.

Spectrum

Although the report rarely misses an opportunity to fail to mention the spectrum crisis that has been at the center of the Administration’s telecom agenda and the focus of the National Broadband Plan, coincidentally authored by the FCC’s staff, the crux of the report seems to come down to a stark denial that such a spectrum crunch even exists.  As I noted, much of the staff report amounts to an extended meditation on why the parties can and should run their businesses as the staff say they can and should.  The report’s section assessing the parties’ claims regarding the transition to LTE (para 210, ff.) is remarkable.  It begins thus:

One of the Applicants’ primary justifications for the necessity of this transaction is that, as standalone firms, AT&T and T-Mobile are, and will continue to be, spectrum and capacity constrained. Due to these constraints, we find it more plausible that a spectrum constrained firm would maximize deployment of more spectrally efficient LTE, rather than limit it. Transitioning to LTE is primarily a function of only two factors: (1) the extent of LTE capable equipment deployed on the network and (2) the penetration of LTE compatible devices in the subscriber base. Although it may make it more economical, the transition does not require “spectrum headroom” as the Applicants claim. Increased deployment could be achieved by both of the Applicants on a standalone basis by adding the more spectrally efficient LTE-capable radios and equipment to the network and then providing customers with dual mode HSPAILTE devices. . . .

Forget the spectrum crunch!  It is the very absence of spectrum that will give firms the incentive and the ability to transition to more-efficient technology.  And all they have to do is run duplicate equipment on their networks and give all their customers new devices overnight.  And, well, the whole business model fits in a few paragraphs, entails no new spectrum, actually creates spectrum, and meets all foreseeable demand (as long as demand never increases which, of course, the report conveniently fails to assess).

Moreover, claims the report, AT&T’s transition to LTE flows inevitably from its competition with Verizon.  But, as Cicconi points out, the staff is unprincipled in its disparate treatment of the industry’s competitive conditions.  Somehow, without T-Mobile in the mix, prices will skyrocket and quality will be degraded—let’s say, just for example, by not upgrading to LTE (my interpretation, not the staff’s).  But 100 pages later, it turns out that AT&T doesn’t need to merge with T-Mobile to expand its LTE network because it will have to do so in response to competition from Verizon anyway.  It would appear, however, that Verizon’s power over AT&T operates only if T-Mobile exists separately and AT&T has a harder time competing.  Remove T-Mobile and expand AT&T’s ability to compete and, apparently, the market collapses.  Such is the logic of the report.

There is much more to criticize in the report, and I hope to have a chance to do so in the next few days.

Filed under: antitrust, business, law and economics, merger guidelines, regulation, technology, telecommunications Tagged: at&t, FCC, merger, t-mobile

FTC Chairman Leibowitz recently gave a speech in which he took on a number of issues, but one in particular caught my eye.  In a portion of the speech describing how antitrust has updated its procedures in order to become more efficient and avoid the problem of having decade-long cases focused upon technologies that are obsolete by the time the case is resolved, Leibowitz offers the following example of Commission success:

The best, recent example of the need to move quickly in the high-tech area is our recent Intel case.11 Our investigation of Intel started out very slowly and went on for quite some time, but once the Commission issued process and then a complaint, the litigation proceeded with alacrity and ended with a consent less than a year later.

We think the remedies in the consent do much to protect consumers while still allowing Intel to innovate, develop, and sell new products. And I am proud of the relationship that we have been able to maintain with Intel since then. Still, we might have gained more for consumers: much was lost in the years between the start of the investigation and the litigation’s conclusion, and competition for CPUs and other components in personal computers might have been different had we moved faster initially. And moving quickly might have been fairer to Intel too.

As a result of what we have learned from Intel and other cases, the Commission is no longer bogged down in outmoded procedures. Much of what we’ve done at the Commission in recent years has been to make us better at getting to the bottom of investigations and resolving them faster to ensure that businesses get certainty and consumers get protection quickly. That was at the heart of the changes to our Part 3 rules, you get an antitrust trial, and it is implicit in every effort we make to learn more about industries and develop our internal expertise. We have also pushed to make “go/no go” decisions on investigations earlier so that they don’t linger on. All this reduces expenses and, I believe, allows us to act with a lighter hand.

There is a lot about this strikes me as misguided.

First, lets start broadly.  Striking quickly and striking accurately are two different things.  As John Wooden famously says “never mistake activity for achievement.”  Bill Kovacic has emphasized that case counts alone (nor win rates alone) are not very informative regarding agency performance.   Claims of agency success based upon activity levels in extracting settlements and such should be viewed skeptically without evidence that the activity prevented anticompetitive activity and improved consumer welfare.  Doing things faster doesn’t mean doing them any better.

Second, so what about accuracy?  If Intel is the “best example” the Chairman can come up with of antitrust enforcement in high-tech industries, this is not a good sign for the Commission.  I’ve written quite a bit about the Intel complaint and settlement — and so won’t belabor the point here — but suffice it to say that the evidence does not support the claim that the settlement improved consumer outcomes.  In fact, consumers are probably worse off in my view.  Reasonable minds may differ on these points but it is difficult to evaluate the evidence and come away confident that the settlement is as successful as claimed.  And that’s not even counting the peculiar endorsement it gives Lepage’s, which has been overwhelming condemned a standard which threatens pro-consumer conduct.

Third, the Chairman writes: “And I am proud of the relationship that we have been able to maintain with Intel since then.”  Ugh.  Developing longstanding relationships with Intel and other companies is not something for the Commission to be proud of.  Its just not.  In this case, the relationship derives from the product design elements of the Intel settlement.  Remember this language?

Respondent shall not make any engineering or design change to a Relevant Product if that change (1) degrades the performance of a Relevant Product sold by a competitor of Respondent and (2) does not provide an actual benefit to the Relevant Product sold by Respondent, including without limitation any improvement in performance, operation, cost, manufacturability, reliability, compatibility, or ability to operate or enhance the operation of another product; provided, however, that any degradation of the performance of a competing product shall not itself be deemed to be a benefit to the Relevant Product sold by Respondent. Respondent shall have the burden of demonstrating that any engineering or design change at issue complies with Section V. of this Order.

I’m sure Intel’s lawyers and engineers have a fine relationship with the FTC.  But lets not mistake that with agency success or something that consumers should celebrate.

Never mistake activity with achievement.

Filed under: antitrust, federal trade commission, technology

Ijust returned from a long weekend in the Caribbean, attempting to recreate the scenery of (and a few scenes from) The Bachelor. Given the ubiquity of Wi-Fi coverage, I was able to stay connected with my favorite newspapers and magazines: iPhone in one hand, Mojito in the other. Just as I was feeling like a one-percenter, I stumbled upon a story about Newt Gingrich’s propensity to use private air travel. According to the Post, “for at least two years [Gingrich] insisted upon flying private charter jets everywhere he traveled, with most of the costs—ranging from $30,000 to $45,000 per trip—billed to [his company] American Solutions.”

Read the full piece here.

TOTM alumnus Todd Henderson recently pointed me to a short, ten-question interview Time Magazine conducted with Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.  Prof. Kahneman is a founding father of behavioral economics, which rejects the rational choice model of human behavior (i.e., humans are rational self-interest maximizers) in favor of a more complicated model that incorporates a number of systematic irrationalities (e.g., the so-called endowment effect, under which people value items they own more than they’d be willing to pay to acquire those same items if they didn’t own them). 

 I’ve been interested in behavioral economics since I took Cass Sunstein’s “Elements of the Law” course as a first-year law student.  Prof. Sunstein is a leading figure in the “behavioral law and economics” movement, which advocates structuring laws and regulations to account for the various irrationalities purportedly revealed by behavioral economics.  Most famously, behavioral L&E calls for the imposition of default rules that “nudge” humans toward outcomes they’d likely choose but for the irrationalities and myopia with which they are beset.

 I’ve long been somewhat suspicious of the behavioral L&E project.  As I once explained in a short response essay entitled Two Mistakes Behavioralists Make,  I suspect that behavioral L&E types are too quick to reject rational explanations for observed human behavior and that they too hastily advocate a governmental fix for irrational behavior.  Time’s interview with Prof. Kahneman did little to allay those two concerns.

Asked to identify his “favorite experiment that demonstrates our blindness to our own blindness,” Prof. Kahneman responded:

It’s one someone else did.  During [the ’90s] when there was terrorist activity in Thailand, people were asked how much they’d pay for a travel-insurance policy that pays $100,000 in case of death for any reason.  Others were asked how much they’d pay for a policy that pays $100,000 for death in a terrorist act.  And people will pay more for the second, even though it’s less likely.

 This answer pattern is admittedly strange.  Since death from a terrorist attack is, a fortiori, less likely than death from any cause, it makes no sense to pay the same amount for the two insurance policies; the “regardless of cause” life insurance policy should command a far higher price.  So maybe people are wildly irrational in comparing risks and the value of risk mitigation measures.

 Or maybe, as boundedly rational (but not systematically irrational) beings, they just don’t want to waste effort answering silly, hypothetical questions about the maximum amount they’d pay for stuff.  I remember exercises in Prof. Sunstein’s class in which we were split into groups and asked to state either how much we’d pay to obtain a certain object or, assuming we owned the object, how much we’d demand as a sales price.  I distinctly recall thinking how artificial the question was.  Given the low stakes of the exercise, I quickly wrote down some number and returned to thinking about what I would have for lunch, what was going to be on Sunstein’s exam, and whether I had adequately prepared for my next class.  I suspect my classmates did as well.  Was it not fully rational for us to conserve our limited mental resources by giving quick, thoughtless answers to wholly hypothetical, zero-stakes questions?

If so, then there are two possible reasons for subjects’ strange answers to the terrorism insurance questions Kahneman cites:  Subjects could be wildly irrational with respect to risk assessment and the value of protective measures, or they might rationally choose to give hasty answers to silly questions that don’t matter.  What we need is some way to choose between these irrational and rational accounts of the answer pattern.

Perhaps the best thing to do would be to examine people’s revealed preferences by looking at what they actually do when they’re spending money to protect against risk.  If Kahneman’s explanation for subjects’ strange answers were sound, we’d see people paying hefty premiums for terrorism insurance.  Profit-seeking insurance companies, in turn, would scramble to create and market such risk protection, realizing that they could charge irrational consumers far more than their expected liabilities.  But we don’t see this sort of thing.

That suggests that the alternative, “rational” (or at least not systematically irrational) account is the more compelling story:  Subjects pestered with questions about how much hypothetical money they’d spend on hypothetical insurance products decide not to invest too much in the decision and just spit out an answer.  As we all learn as kids, you a ask a silly question, you get a silly answer.

So again we see the behavioralist tendency to discount the rational account too quickly.  But what about the second common behavioralist mistake (i.e., hastily jumping from an observation about human irrationality to the conclusion that a governmental fix is warranted)?  On that issue, consider this portion of the interview:

Time:  You endorse a kind of libertarian paternalism that gives people freedom of choice but frames the choice so they are nudged toward the option that’s better for them.  Are you worried that experts will misuse that?

Kahneman:  What psychology and behavioral economics have shown is that people don’t think very carefully.  They’re influenced by all sorts of superficial things in their decisionmaking, and they procrastinate and don’t read the small print.  You’ve got to create situations so they’ll make better decisions for themselves.

Could Prof. Kahneman have been more evasive?  The question was about an obvious downside of governmental intervention to correct for systematic irrationalities, but Prof. Kahneman, channeling Herman “9-9-9” Cain, just ignored it and repeated his affirmative case.  This is a serious problem for the behavioral L&E crowd:  They think they’re done once they convince you that humans exhibit some irrationalities.  But they’re not.  Just as one may believe in anthropogenic global warming and still oppose efforts to combat it on cost-benefit grounds, one may be skeptical of a nudge strategy even if one believes that humans may, in fact, exhibit some systematic irrationalities.  Individual free choice may have its limits, but governmental decisionmaking (executed by self-serving humans whose own rationality is limited) may amount to a cure that’s worse than the disease.

Readers interested in the promise and limitations of behavioral law and economics should check out TOTM’s all-star Free to Choose Symposium.

 

Filed under: behavioral economics, behavioral economics, economics, free to choose symposium, law and economics, nobel prize, regulation

TOTM readers know that I’ve long been skeptical of claims that expansive use of Section 5 of the FTC Act will prove productive for consumers.  I’ve been critical of recent applications of Section 5 such as Intel and N-Data.  Now comes yet another FTC consent decree in PoolCorp.  I’m still skeptical.  Indeed, PoolCorp appears to provide ammunition for those (like me) who have criticized the Commission’s stance on expansive use of Section 5 precisely upon the grounds that it can and will be applied to conduct that is either competitively neutral or even procompetitive.

Commissioner Rosch’s dissent makes many of the key points.  Indeed his opening line gets straight to the point: “This case presents the novel situation of a company willing to enter into a consent decree notwithstanding a lack of evidence indicating that a violation has occurred.”

Before getting to specifics, the sharp disagreement between the majority and Commissioner Rosch on both the most basic of facts and economic principles is hard to miss, and gives the entire exchange a rather peculiar feel.  Here’s an example.  The majority describes the case as a standard application of a “Raising Rivals’ Costs” theory, citing Krattenmaker & Salop.  The allegation is that:

Specifically, the Complaint alleges that PoolCorp, which possesses monopoly power in many local distribution markets, threatened its suppliers (i.e., pool product manufacturers) that it would no longer distribute a manufacturer’s products on a nationwide basis if that manufacturer sold its products to a new distributor that was attempting to enter a local market.

The conditions that must be satisfied for an exclusionary theory are well known.  Substantial foreclosure of a critical input is one such necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the possibility of competitive harm.  The majority argues that PoolCorp “foreclosed new entrants from obtaining pool products from manufacturers representing more than 70 percent of sales.”  But standard antitrust analysis tells us that such foreclosure is not enough to support an inference of harm to competition.  First, we must ask whether the threatened refusals to deal actually had any impact on the allegedly impaired rivals or whether they were able to easily realign supply contracts?  Second, and most fundamentally, we must ask whether the conduct at issue had any impact on competition itself, or upon consumers in the form of higher prices, reduced output, lower quality, etc.?

Here is where things get, well, weird.

Did PoolCorp’s actions actually disadvantage any rivals?  The majority concedes that “Some of PoolCorp’s targets were able to survive by purchasing pool products from other distributors rather than directly from the
manufacturers.” Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for the Commission.  If a few firms survived but others were excluded (surely the implication of the sentence), we should continue our analysis.  But was there actually any foreclosure?

Here’s Commissioner Rosch in dissent:

“The investigation revealed that PoolCorp’s demands were not honored by manufacturers.”

What about those potential entrants that were excluded — the ones that were not so lucky as the surviving targets the majority mentions?

“Another problem with this case is that no entrants were actually excluded.”

Yikes.  One gets the impression that the Commissioners are not talking about the same case.  The majority is full of broad generalizations and assertions but no real discussion of facts.  Commissioner Rosch’s dissent offers a bit more on the exclusion claim:

“The only claim to the contrary is in Paragraph 28 of the complaint, which alleges that in Baton Rouge, “the new entrant’s business ultimately failed in 2005” because of the lack of “direct access to the manufacturers’ pool products.” The complaint neglects to mention that this entrant was able to secure supplies from other sources and later sold itself to an established out-of-state distributor. Since then, that distributor, which has had full access to supplies, has been a highly effective rival to PoolCorp. Thus, to the extent PoolCorp’s threats had an effect in Baton Rouge, they may have led to more, not less, competition.”

Not good for the Commission majority.  But injury to rivals isn’t our primary concern.  What about injury to competition?  Here, things get even murkier.  The majority plainly asserts “the harm to consumers that occurred as a result was substantial” and “consumers had fewer choices and were forced to pay higher prices for pool products.”  Sounds relatively straightforward.  Once again, Commissioner Rosch’s dissent exposes disagreement over the most basic of antitrust-relevant facts (emphasis added):

“A third problem with this case is that there was no consumer injury. The investigation did not uncover price increases, service degradation, or other anticompetitive effects in any local markets.”

Rosch goes on:

The basis for the majority statement’s claim that there was “substantial” consumer harm resulting from the alleged conduct of Respondent is a mystery. The complaint contains no factual allegations of any harm to consumers, much less “substantial” harm. Likewise, there are no factual allegations in the complaint corroborating the majority’s claim that consumers “had fewer choices and were forced to pay higher prices for pool products.”

This is a real mess.  Proponents of an expanded application of Section 5 (including Commissioner Rosch) frequently argue that it is capable of being applied with certain limiting principles, including demonstration of consumer injury.  To his credit, Commissioner Rosch is sticking to his guns on consumer injury as a limiting principle here.  But the evidence that the Section 5 is too enticing a tool for the Commission in cases lacking consumer injury is mounting.  The public disagreement over basic facts — is there harm to consumers or not?  was there foreclosure or not?  if so, how much? — also does not inspire confidence that the Commission’s discretion in applying Section 5 in cases where the conduct lies outside the scope of the Sherman Act for technical reasons will be applied in a manner consistent with the consumer welfare goals of antitrust.

Those are general problems with Section 5.  As applied here, the majority opinion is also analytically incoherent.   The Commission majority must deal with the fact that there appears to be no real foreclosure as a result of PoolCorp’s conduct — recall that what the majority described as a few successful surviving firms turns out to be no actual exclusion whatsoever.  Despite the fact that absence of foreclosure or injury to rivals in a case like this is typically the end of the line for the plaintiff, the Commission doesn’t appear to be bothered at all by the lack of evidence of harm to rivals or consumers.  Responding to the fact of no foreclosure, the Commission writes:

“However, we assess consumer harm relative to market conditions that would have existed but for the respondent’s allegedly unlawful conduct. Here, PoolCorp’s strategy significantly increased a new entrant’s costs of obtaining pool products. Conduct by a monopolist that raises rivals’ costs can harm competition by creating an artificial price floor or deterring investments in quality, service and innovation.”

This doesn’t make any sense.  If there is no foreclosure, there is no risk of consumer harm.  Period.  Indeed, while the majority asserts it, there appears to be no actual evidence of consumer harm.  At a minimum, its up for serious debate.  If it were true that PoolCorp’s strategy “increased a few entrant’s cost of obtaining pool products” in practice, and that there were sufficient exclusion to create additional market power, two things would be true: (1) one would observe harm to the rival, and (2) there would be harm to competition in the form of higher prices or reduced output.  Apparently, the Commission could must neither — even when challenged by Commissioner Rosch’s dissent to do so.

One last observation.  Commissioner Rosch’s dissent hints that economic analysis in the case demonstrated that “even if” PoolCorp fully foreclosed its rivals the harm to consumers would be minimal and a waste of Commission resources.   Query: what role are agency economists playing in the Commission’s Section5 agenda?  Unfortunately, it does not appear to be a significant one.

Filed under: antitrust, economics, exclusionary conduct, federal trade commission, monopolization

My last two posts on search bias (here and here) have analyzed and critiqued Edelman & Lockwood’s small study on search bias.  This post extends this same methodology and analysis to a random sample of 1,000 Google queries (released by AOL in 2006), to develop a more comprehensive understanding of own-content bias.  As I’ve stressed, these analyses provide useful—but importantly limited—glimpses into the nature of the search engine environment.  While these studies are descriptively helpful, actual harm to consumer welfare must always be demonstrated before cognizable antitrust injuries arise.  And naked identifications of own-content bias simply do not inherently translate to negative effects on consumers (see, e.g., here and here for more comprehensive discussion).

Now that’s settled, let’s jump into the results of the 1,000 random search query study.

How Do Search Engines Rank Their Own Content?

Consistent with our earlier analysis, a starting off point for thinking about measuring differentiation among search engines with respect to placing their own content is to compare how a search engine ranks its own content relative to how other engines place that same content (e.g. to compare how Google ranks “Google Maps” relative to how Bing or Blekko rank it).   Restricting attention exclusively to the first or “top” position, I find that Google simply does not refer to its own content in over 90% of queries.  Similarly, Bing does not reference Microsoft content in 85.4% of queries.  Google refers to its own content in the first position when other search engines do not in only 6.7% of queries; while Bing does so over twice as often, referencing Microsoft content that no other engine references in the first position in 14.3% of queries.  The following two charts illustrate the percentage of Google or Bing first position results, respectively, dedicated to own content across search engines.

The most striking aspect of these results is the small fraction of queries for which placement of own-content is relevant.  The results are similar when I expand consideration to the entire first page of results; interestingly, however, while the levels of own-content bias are similar considering the entire first page of results, Bing is far more likely than Google to reference its own content in its very first results position.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Google

Two distinct differences between the results of this larger study and my replication of Edelman & Lockwood emerge: (1) Google and Bing refer to their own content in a significantly smaller percentage of cases here than in the non-random sample; and (2) in general, when Google or Bing does rank its own content highly, rival engines are unlikely to similarly rank that same content.

The following table reports the percentages of queries for which Google’s ranking of its own content and its rivals’ rankings of that same content differ significantly. When Google refers to its own content within its Top 5 results, at least one other engine similarly ranks this content for only about 5% of queries.

The following table presents the likelihood that Google content will appear in a Google search, relative to searches conducted on rival engines (reported in odds ratios).

The first and third columns report results indicating that Google affiliated content is more likely to appear in a search executed on Google rather than rival engines.  Google is approximately 16 times more likely to refer to its own content on its first page as is any other engine.  Bing and Blekko are both significantly less likely to refer to Google content in their first result or on their first page than Google is to refer to Google content within these same parameters.  In each iteration, Bing is more likely to refer to Google content than is Blekko, and in the case of the first result, Bing is much more likely to do so.  Again, to be clear, the fact that Bing is more likely to rank its own content is not suggestive that the practice is problematic.  Quite the contrary, the demonstration that firms both with and without market power in search (to the extent that is a relevant antitrust market) engage in similar conduct the correct inference is that there must be efficiency explanations for the practice.  The standard response, of course, is that the competitive implications of a practice are different when a firm with market power does it.  That’s not exactly right.  It is true that firms with market power can engage in conduct that gives rise to potential antitrust problems when the same conduct from a firm without market power would not; however, when firms without market power engage in the same business practice it demands that antitrust analysts seriously consider the efficiency implications of the practice.  In other words, there is nothing in the mantra that things are “different” when larger firms do them that undercut potential efficiency explanations.

Examining Search Engine “Bias” on Bing

For queries within the larger sample, Bing refers to Microsoft content within its Top 1 and 3 results when no other engine similarly references this content for a slightly smaller percentage of queries than in my Edelman & Lockwood replication.  Yet Bing continues to exhibit a strong tendency to rank Microsoft content more prominently than rival engines.  For example, when Bing refers to Microsoft content within its Top 5 results, other engines agree with this ranking for less than 2% of queries; and Bing refers to Microsoft content that no other engine does within its Top 3 results for 99.2% of queries:

Regression analysis further illustrates Bing’s propensity to reference Microsoft content that rivals do not.  The following table reports the likelihood that Microsoft content is referred to in a Bing search as compared to searches on rival engines (again reported in odds ratios).

Bing refers to Microsoft content in its first results position about 56 times more often than rival engines refer to Microsoft content in this same position.  Across the entire first page, Microsoft content appears on a Bing search about 25 times more often than it does on any other engine.  Both Google and Blekko are accordingly significantly less likely to reference Microsoft content.  Notice further that, contrary to the findings in the smaller study, Google is slightly less likely to return Microsoft content than is Blekko, both in its first results position and across its entire first page.

A Closer Look at Google v. Bing

 Consistent with the smaller sample, I find again that Bing is more biased than Google using these metrics.  In other words, Bing ranks its own content significantly more highly than its rivals do more frequently then Google does, although the discrepancy between the two engines is smaller here than in the study of Edelman & Lockwood’s queries.  As noted above, Bing is over twice as likely to refer to own content in first results position than is Google.

Figures 7 and 8 present the same data reported above, but with Blekko removed, to allow for a direct visual comparison of own-content bias between Google and Bing.

Consistent with my earlier results, Bing appears to consistently rank Microsoft content higher than Google ranks the same (Microsoft) content more frequently than Google ranks Google content more prominently than Bing ranks the same (Google) content.

This result is particularly interesting given the strength of the accusations condemning Google for behaving in precisely this way.  That Bing references Microsoft content just as often as—and frequently even more often than!—Google references its own content strongly suggests that this behavior is a function of procompetitive product differentiation, and not abuse of market power.  But I’ll save an in-depth analysis of this issue for my next post, where I’ll also discuss whether any of the results reported in this series of posts support anticompetitive foreclosure theories or otherwise suggest antitrust intervention is warranted.

Filed under: antitrust, economics, google, Internet search, law and economics, technology Tagged: Bias, Bing, Blekko, google, microsoft, Web search engine

My apologies to TOTM readers for taking last week off. A firm retreat in Phoenix followed by a hearing in Oklahoma City really puts a crimp on one’s fun time. In the meantime, the BCS announced that it is considering eliminating the automatic-qualification offers to BCS conference champions. The ACC and Big East must not be pleased. Proof that what gets written on this blog has a significant (and positive) impact on the world around us.

Read the full piece here.

Economists are all quite familiar with the “holdup problem,” i.e. one contracting partner exploiting the other after asset specific investments have been made.  One classic law school textbook example is Alaska Packers v. Domenico in which the Alaska Packers’ Association hired Domenico for the salmon season for $50 plus 2 cents per salmon caught, but after leaving the dock and arriving in Alaskan waters for the short salmon season, the workers demanded an increase in their pay.  The defendant agreed, but upon return to San Francisco, refused to pay.  The seaman sued and lost on the theory that the exchange did not involve fresh consideration.  This, Judge Posner has argued, was the right economic result on the grounds that it discourages holdup.  Many of our readers will also be familiar with the famous Fisher Body / GM example of vertical integration solving the holdup problem, and the subsequent debate between Benjamin Klein and Ronald Coase over that particular example.

Now comes another example of the holdup problem at work.  In fact, it is difficult to imagine a better example.  Apparently, half way through a flight from India to Birmingham, England, an airline took advantage of the asset specific investments made by its passengers to alter the terms of the deal:

Passengers aboard two chartered jetliners from India to Britain were hit up for about $200 each, in cash, to continue their trip this week in what one flier compared to a hostage situation.  The charter company, Austria-based Comtel Air, and the Spanish company that owns the planes pointed fingers at each other over the situation Thursday. But Lal Dadrah, a passenger on one of the flights who recorded the crew passing the hat, called the situation “a complete, utter sham.”

Comtel Air passengers on a Tuesday flight to Birmingham, England, from the Indian city of Amritsar were hit up for 130 pounds — about $200 each — during a layover in Vienna. They were allowed off the aircraft to take the money from teller machines, a process that took about seven hours. There were varying accounts of what the money was to pay for, ranging from fuel to fees.

The NY Times story provides a few more details:

Britain’s Channel 4 news broadcast video showing a Comtel cabin crew member telling passengers: “We need some money to pay the fuel, to pay the airport, to pay everything we need. If you want to go to Birmingham, you have to pay.”

Some passengers said they were sent off the plane to cash machines in Vienna to raise the money.

“We all got together, took our money out of purses — 130 pounds ($205),” said Reena Rindi, who was aboard with her daughter. “Children under two went free, my little one went free because she’s under two. If we didn’t have the money, they were making us go one by one outside, in Vienna, to get the cash out.”

The economics don’t stop there.  There is potential for an agency problem as well:

Bhupinder Kandra, the airline’s majority shareholder, told the Associated Press from Vienna that travel agents had taken the passengers’ money before the planes left but had not passed it on to the airline.  “This is not my problem,” he said. “The problem is with the agents.”

A great example for the classroom.

 

Filed under: contracts

Herb Hovenkamp has posted his new casebook on Innovation and Competition Policy to SSRN, where one can download the chapters individually.  This is a very nice development for students; and the book seems perfectly fit for a course on Innovation and Competition Policy — for which it was designed — but also appropriate for a variety of similarly-themed seminar courses.

Professor Hovenkamp describes the aims of the book here:

This is not an “IP/antitrust” casebook.  There are already excellent books in that field.  Only about half of the principal cases printed in this book are antitrust decisions.  I use this book to present issues of innovation and competition policy to students in a broader context, examining not only antitrust but also the intellectual property laws and including shorter examination of several other topics, such as telecommunications, net neutrality, and competition issues raised by the DMCA.  Brief attention is also given to the industrial organization literature on innovation.

This casebook begins with a chapter on patent scope and its implications for innovation, with brief coverage of the Schumpeter-Arrow literature and the problem of sequential innovation.  Then it looks in some detail at the problem of complementary relationships, addressed in antitrust mainly through the law of tying arrangements.  After that is a chapter on remedies issues, followed by chapters on the patent system, copyright, practices that restrain innovation, and intellectual property misuse.  Another chapter covers exclusionary practices and another a wide variety of collaborative arrangements, including pooling, standard setting, blanket licenses, and the like.  The final chapter focuses on vertical restraints and the post-sale (exhaustion) doctrine.

I hope to keep this book up to date on a regular basis and welcome any suggestions for revision or inclusion.  My overall goal, however, is to hold the book somewhere in the range of its current length.

 

Filed under: antitrust