Josh’s ongoing series on “Nudging Antitrust” and FTC Commissioner Rosch’s recent thoughts on behavioral economics has been excellent and I look forward to the next installment.  Rosch’s speech, not surprisingly, also elicited a strong response from me.  What follows are my thoughts on Rosch’s speech, focusing on some of the same issues Josh addressed in his first post.

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As regular readers know, interchange fees are a frequent topic of conversation around the blog.  Taking the conversation from the ether to the real world, ICLE has funded a white paper and is putting on a conference next week on the topic.  The conference, in fact, grows out of the successful online symposium we held here at Truth on the Market a few months ago.  An e-book/pdf version of the posts and comments from that sympoisum can be downloaded here, by the way.  A few of the participants from the symposium will be participating in the conference, as well (more below).

Read the full piece here. 

Chris Hoofnagle writing at the TAP blog about Facebook’s comprehensive privacy options (“To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.”) claims that…

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Abstract

There are very few industries that can attract the attention of Congress, multiple federal and state agencies, consumer groups, economists, antitrust lawyers, the business community, farmers, ranchers, and academics as the agriculture workshops have. Of course, with intense interest from stakeholders comes intense pressure from potential winners and losers in the political process, heated disagreement over how gains from trade should be distributed among various stakeholders, and certainly a variety of competing views over the correct approach to competition policy in agriculture markets. These pressures have the potential to distract antitrust analysis from its core mission: protecting competition and consumer welfare. While imperfect, the economic approach to antitrust that has generated remarkable improvements in outcomes over the last fifty years has rejected simplistic and misleading notions that antitrust is meant to protect “small dealers and worthy men” or to fulfill non-economic objectives; that market concentration is a predictor of market performance; or that competition policy and intellectual property cannot peacefully co-exist. Unfortunately, in the run-up to and during the workshops much of the policy rhetoric encouraged adopting these outdated antitrust approaches, especially ones that would favor one group of stakeholders over another rather than protecting the competitive process. In this essay, we argue that a first principles approach to antitrust analysis is required to guarantee the benefits of competition in the agricultural sector, and discuss three fundamental principles of modern antitrust that, at times, appear to be given short-shrift in the recent debate.

David Balto has penned a short apologia of the FTC’s Intel case (HT: Danny Sokol).  Unfortunately his defense (and, unfortunately, the FTC’s case) is woefully misguided.

Balto writes…

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News items continue to pile up suggesting that the FTC is likely to challenge Google’s acquisition of mobile application and website advertising provider, AdMob. See this recent article from the Wall Street Journal and this from Yahoo!, for example.

Read the full piece here. 

The DOJ has posted the transcript from the recent DOJ/USDA hearings on antitrust in agriculture here.  I figured our readers might be especially interested in seeing Christine Varney’s comments (especially without having to slog through all 350 pages to find them!).  I have bolded some of the most interesting parts of her comments.

Read the full piece here. 

Summary

“Michael Carrier has written a timely and interesting book. There is much to like about the book, in particular its accessible format and content. I do fear that it is a bit overly ambitious, however, hoping both to educate the completely uninitiated as well as to develop a more advanced agenda, and at times it reads like two separate books. I suppose related to this criticism are my more detailed comments, which perhaps distill down to this: The book repeatedly and appropriately canvasses both sides of some pretty heated debates, nicely presenting the most basic arguments, and suggesting if not saying that these are matters about which we are profoundly uncertain. Nevertheless, with what seems to me to be little support (and with only essentially anecdotal empirical support), Carrier then chooses sides.

For example, the concept of the innovation market is contentious and unsettled. Carrier presents truncated versions of both sides of this debate and then summarily votes in favor of innovation markets, slyly offering to confine the analysis to pharmaceutical industry mergers, but nevertheless offering a “framework for innovation-market analysis.” Frankly, the framework strikes me as little more than a stylized merger analysis under the Guidelines, with a “Schumpeterian Defense” thrown in for good measure (but extremely limited, and essentially the same as the traditional failing firm defense). I see little here to suggest that the innovation market analysis, even as styled by Carrier, will do much effectively to incorporate dynamic efficiency concerns into antitrust. And there are other examples. I would have preferred to see a book that went into far greater depth in defending these sorts of choices among uncertain alternatives.”

In a recent commentary at Forbes.com, former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro argues that some 250,000 jobs would be created, and consumers would save $27 billion annually, by reducing the interchange fee charged to merchants for transactions made by consumers using credit and debit cards.  If true, these are some incredible numbers.

Read the full piece here.