The FTC has filed its primary appellate brief in the Whole Foods case. In essence, the brief asserts two claims: that the district court evaluated the Commission’s request for a preliminary injunction under an overly stringent legal standard, and that the court improperly discounted the Commission’s evidence that a Whole Foods/Wild Oats merger would reduce competition and harm consumers. While the Commission is wrong on both points, this appeal might be a good thing — it could provide the courts (maybe even the Supreme Court!) with an opportunity to do some much-needed house cleaning on merger policy.

Read the full piece here.

My colleague Thom Lambert has a nice piece on Britney Spears over at Truth on the Market. Yes, really. Thom asks whether Britney’s popularity, which seems unrelated to intrinsic merit, is due to network effects — people are interested in her because other people are interested in her, and so on — leading us down an irreversible path toward Britneymania. Paul David, call your office! Britney, Thom suggests, may be like the QWERTY keyboard — grossly inefficient but hard to replace.

Read the full piece here.

At Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson points to the absence of decision markets evaluating competitive conditions in the post-merger world as evidence that “these companies are just not serious about finding the highest value applications of prediction markets.” Here’s a description of the markets that Robin has in mind…

Read the full piece here.

The FDA has determined that milk and meat from some cloned animals (cattle, swine, and goats) is safe to eat. It has therefore lifted a moratorium on such products. But don’t expect to see milk and meat from cloned animals in your local grocery store. Cloning is incredibly expensive, so cloned animals would almost certainly never be slaughtered or used for milking. Instead, they’d be used for breeding. The idea is that we’d use cloning to create exact reproductions of animals with superior qualities, and we’d then breed those cloned specimens to generate superior offspring.

Read the full piece here.

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.

Read the full piece here.

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.

Read the full piece here.

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.

Read the full piece here.

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.

Read the full piece here.

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

Read the full piece here.