One of the biggest names in economics, Daron Acemoglu, recently joined the mess that is Twitter. He wasted no time in throwing out big ideas for discussion and immediately getting tons of, let us say, spirited replies.

One of Acemoglu’s threads involved a discussion of F.A. Hayek’s famous essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” wherein Hayek questions central planners’ ability to acquire and utilize such knowledge. Echoing many other commentators, Acemoglu asks: can supercomputers and artificial intelligence get around Hayek’s concerns?

Read the full piece here.

ICLE President Geoff Manne joined the American Bar Association’s Our Curious Amalgam podcast to debate Spencer Waller of the Loyola University Chicago School of Law over the core purpose of antitrust and whether it should be solely concerned with economic efficiency, or also used as a tool to uphold and promote democratic values. The full conversation is embedded below.

ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht joined the Human Action Podcast to discuss the work of economists Armen Alchian and Robert Lucas. Video of the full conversation is embedded below.

Summary of Argument

Courts should approach predatory pricing claims with caution because price cutting is central to competition and because false positive errors can chill competition to the detriment of economic efficiency and consumer welfare.

Total average system cost is not an appropriate price floor for finding predation; the district court was right to reject a fixed-cost standard. This Court should reject claims based on the allegedly exclusionary effect of pricing not shown to be below short-run incremental cost. Moreover, a contention that Duke Energy’s discount or rebate structure was “exclusionary” should not change the analysis, because the timing of price reductions should not be relevant.

Brexit was supposed to free the United Kingdom from Brussels’ heavy-handed regulation and red tape. But dreams of a Singapore-on-the-Thames are slowly giving way to ill-considered regulation that threatens to erode Britain’s position as one of the world’s leading tech hubs.

The UK Competition and Markets Authority’s recent decision to block the merger of Microsoft and game-maker Activision-Blizzard offers a case in point. Less than a month after the CMA formally announced its opposition to the deal, the European Commission has thrown a spanner in the works. Looking at the same facts, the commission—no paragon of free-market thinking—concluded the merger would benefit competition and consumers, paving the way for it to move ahead in the Old Continent.

Read the full piece here.

Some may refer to this as the Roundup Formerly Known as the FTC Roundup. If you recorded yourself while reading out loud, and your name is Dove, that is what it sounds like when doves sigh.

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Abstract

It is widely assumed that platform technology markets are inherently prone to converge on monopoly outcomes in which a single firm or a handful of firms enjoy market power due to a combination of network effects and switching costs. This assumption supports both proposed and enacted regulatory interventions under competition law that place significant limitations on a wide range of practices by platform incumbents. In this paper, I revisit this market power assumption from theoretical and empirical perspectives. As a matter of theory, informed by selected real-world examples, I show that the conditions under which a platform incumbent can plausibly exercise market power are substantially more demanding than is commonly assumed. As a matter of empirics, I provide evidence from the food-delivery and cloud-computing markets, showing that widespread attributions of market power to leading platforms in these markets lack persuasive evidentiary support. Contrary to conventional wisdom, both theory and evidence cast significant doubt on the standard view that platform ecosystems are prone to converge on entrenched monopolies that justify preemptive intervention by competition regulators.

American economists played no role in the enactment of the 1890 Sherman Act and had very little influence in the development of the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Act in 1914, even though the 1912 presidential campaign had focused on the antitrust issue. Former President Theodore Roosevelt had very harsh words to say about the effectiveness of antitrust policy, considering it at best vain if not counterproductive. Louis Brandeis, a populist attorney who advised Woodrow Wilson in the course of his presidential campaign, was one of the key players in the establishment of the FTC. However, even the future Supreme Court justice only intended the agency to be preventive, not curative.

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The United Kingdom’s 2016 “Brexit” decision to leave the European Union created the opportunity for the elimination of unwarranted and excessive EU regulations that had constrained UK economic growth and efficiency.

Recognizing that fact, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson launched the Task Force on Innovation, Growth, and Regulatory Reform, whose May 2021 report recommended “a new regulatory vision for the UK.” That vision emphasized “[p]romot[ing] productivity, competition and innovation through a new framework of proportionate, agile and less bureaucratic regulation.”

Read the full piece here.