I promised to start by addressing some common criticisms of prediction markets. What better way to start than by attacking my friend, GW colleague, and now co-conspirator Orin Kerr? Orin has at least twice (in 2005, and earlier this month) endorsed the criticism that the election markets don’t seem to do much more than track the conventional wisdom. Orin is in good if unfamiliar company; Paul Krugman recently made a similar criticism.

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Motivated by a slate of forthcoming articles, books, and various projects involving unincorporated firms, Professor Ribstein has announced his plans to begin blogging more extensively about partnership, LLCs and agency issues over at Ideoblog. This is good news to anybody interested in issues of business law and finance more generally. Two early installments in this endeavor are already up here and here.

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Thom was recently invited to draft a critical response to a symposium at the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies on the future of single firm conduct. The transcript from the Roundtable Discussion is available on SSRN.  Thom graciously asked me to join him in drafting a short critical piece to the symposium. It is difficult to respond to an entire symposium in under 20 pages, and we are quite sure we were not able to get to it all of it. We did our best to hit the highlights and central themes of the conversation and contrast the generally pro-interventionist views expressed by the conference panelists with our more skeptical views about the proper scope of the antitrust enterprise in our modern economy.

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Courtesy of Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog, the following two papers have been posted on SSRN and may be of interest to our readers. First is Keith Hylton’s analysis of the Weyerhaueser decision, Weyerhaeuser, Predatory Bidding, and Error Costs.

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The value of interdisciplinary legal education is coming up once again. This time, Brian Tamahana argues that the interdisciplinary movement is a bad idea…

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Abstract

In Weyerhaeuser v. Ross-Simmons the Supreme Court held that the predatory pricing standard adopted in Brooke Group also applies to predatory bidding claims, because the two types of predation are “analytically similar”. I argue that predatory bidding is likely to be more harmful to consumer welfare than is predatory pricing. Successful input market predation may lead to a “dual market power” outcome in which the firm has market power in both the input and the output market. In spite of the analytical distinction, consideration of error costs leads me to conclude that Brooke Group remains the best standard to apply to predatory bidding claims.

We’ve been following presidential statements on antitrust here at TOTM — mostly through press releases to the AAI (e.g. our analysis of statements from Obama and Edwards). I’ve been largely disappointed at the lack of attention to antitrust thus far from the candidates, with virtually no statements at all from the Republican side and only a few from the Dems. This Reuters story (HT: Antitrust Review) offers a little bit of information from the perspective of antitrust practitioners on the predicted policies from various candidates. Noticeably, there was nothing directly from the candidates’ camps.

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New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has issued a subpoena to Intel Corp. as part of an investigation into whether Intel’s discounting practices violate federal or state antitrust laws. According to Cuomo’s press release, the subpoena…

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I’d have to say the answer is yes (duh). Radiohead’s In Rainbows made a stunning “official” debut, coming out at number 1 on the Billboard chart with 122,000 US sales in the first week.

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