From the Attorney General’s Memorandum to the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force (HT: Michael Giberson, who is a must read on all issues oil and energy related:

Based upon our work and research to date, it is evident that there are regional differences in gasoline prices, as well as differences in the statutory and other legal tools at the government’s disposal. It is also clear that there are lawful reasons for increases in gas prices, given supply and demand.

See Giberson’s analysis of price gouging laws here.  Michael Salinger, former colleague at the Federal Trade Commission where he was Director of the Bureau of Economics, has one of my favorite lines on the relevant economics.  In writing about the FTC Report on price gouging after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Salinger wrote, “as unpleasant as high-priced gasoline is, running out will be even worse.”  Actually, the whole context is worth a read:

If the public were to ask my advice on the wisdom of price gouging legislation, however, I would counsel against it. When disasters like Katrina and Rita occur, prices must go up.

The difficulty is that without knowing the details of a disaster, it is impossible to specify in advance how much prices need to rise. As result, price-gouging legislation — particularly if penalties are severe and enforcement is aggressive — will pose two distinct risks. One is that prices will not rise to market-clearing levels and gas stations will run out of gasoline. As unpleasant as high-priced gasoline is, running out will be even worse.

The other is that gas stations will shut down rather than risk an allegation of price gouging. In the wake of major market disruptions, it is always going to be possible in hindsight to identify companies that raised the price the most and to label them as “gougers.” But gasoline stations do not set prices in hindsight. A vague definition of price gouging will make it difficult for gas station owners to know what price they can charge and stay within the law. Indeed, the FTC investigation uncovered examples of gas stations that shut down rather than risk a suit under a state price-gouging statute.

See also here.

Filed under: antitrust, economics, markets, regulation

Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani have a posted a series of short blog posts on the Huffington Post focusing on Google, antitrust, and more specifically, vertical integration and search (Part I, Part II, and Part III).   The articles contain much of the standard hand-wringing about vertical integration and its impact on consumer welfare.  This is an issue I’ve written about here and here.  On its own, their analysis adds little new insight to understanding these issues from an antitrust perspective.  The series of posts are noteworthy, however, for two reasons.   The first is that Clemons and Madhani offer the very awkward economic argument, but one that I’ve observed with increasing frequency when it comes to search, that consumers cannot be trusted to make decisions that improve their own welfare.  For example, Clemons and Madhani concede that many of the practices they and others have criticized with respect to search provide consumer benefits.  However, Clemons and Madhani write:

It should be obvious that consumers are not always the best judges of their own welfare, and it should be obvious that consumers have extreme difficulty judging whether actions will improve their welfare if the results follow from complex interactions, occur after a significant delay, or both. The argument that government should help consumers through regulation sounds paternalistic, but if consumers were always the best judges of their long-term welfare, we would not have problems with smoking or obesity.

We know that consumers often make bad decisions when an experience is immediately pleasurable and when harm is deferred or the relationship between cause and effect are complex and not immediately visible. Free software is pleasurable. This free software is funded through excessive charges imposed on companies that need to pay to be found through search; consumers cannot readily observe the harm that comes from these excessive charges because the complex mechanisms by which these charges are passed along to consumers are not directly observable.

One need not be an extreme adherent to the notion that consumers generally behave rationally and in their self-interest to reject the contention that consumer preferences ought to be given zero weight in the analysis.  That’s not entire fair.  Clemons and Madhani do not give zero weight to consumer preferences; they appear to assign consumers’ valuation of these services negative weight.  That is, the authors argue not only that consumers are simply not capable of knowing whether they derive greater value from X or Y, but also that the fact that consumers choose X, ceteris paribus,  increases the likelihood that X is engaged in anticompetitive behavior.  Quite odd.  And certainly unrelated to any economic conception of consumer welfare.

So what is left of consumer welfare analysis without the consumers?  Its not a trick question.  How does one know that these consumers and their faulty preferences are actually harmed in practice?   Harm to rivals is sufficient, Clemons and Madhani appear to answer:

Google’s revision to its search engine, code-named Panda, substantially reduced the visibility of low quality sites, which is definitely a good thing. But the Panda release also seems to have slammed Ciao.co.uk, a Microsoft-owned company, and a potential competitor as a pricing comparison site, which had been leading an EU competition case against Google.

The real argument that Clemons and Madhani make is that consumers’ initial happiness with increased convenience from search bias helping them find what they are looking for will result in harm to rivals, such as online travel sites that want to be found, that these firms will pay higher fees that are invisible to consumers though they are passed on to them in the form of higher prices, and consumers will “remain content and oblivious to harm.”  It remains unclear as to how consumers, even ones that do not always behave in their best interest, will remain oblivious to higher prices.  There are lots of business models in which consumers do not know the internal cost structure of operating a business, or what percentage of what fees are ultimately passed on.  But the assumption that consumers are altogether insensitive to prices and price competition is an extreme and unrealistic one.

In any event, the explicit paternalism embedded in the approach here are obvious, and in my opinion misguided.  But just entertaining the argument on the merits for a moment, Clemons and Madhani concede that search bias and vertical integration provide at least some real short-term consumer benefits that must be weighed against the long-term competitive risks.  They write: “Consumers appear to be well-served at present, and consumers may even believe they are well-served at present, but ultimately and inevitably they will not be well-served in the future.”

This is not altogether unrelated to the right economic approach, i.e. the weighing of short-term benefits against long-term risks.  However, the authors make a key mistake in assessing the risks of harm to competition in the future, i.e. conflating harm to rivals with harm to the competitive process.  As I’ve written:

An antitrust inquiry would distinguish harm to competitors from harm to competition; it would focus its inquiry on whether bias impaired the competitive process by foreclosing rivals from access to consumers and not merely whether various listings would be improved but for Google’s bias.  The answer to that question is clearly yes.  The relevant question, however, is whether that bias is efficient.   Evidence that other search engines with much smaller market shares, and certainly without any market power, exhibit similar bias would suggest to most economists that the practice certainly has some efficiency justifications.  Edelman ignores that possibility and by doing so, ignores decades of economic theory and empirical evidence.  This is a serious error, as the overwhelming lesson of that literature is that restrictions on vertical contracting and integration are a serious threat to consumer welfare.

One might believe, given that Clemons and Madhani at least pay lip service to the notion that search bias improves consumer welfare, that they might advocate some sort of fact-intensive rule of reason analysis that attempted to ferret out anticompetitive examples of search bias or vertical integration from those that are pro-competitive.  Such an approach would at least be consistent with the economic literature on vertical integration — which tells a much different tale about the competitive effects of the practice.  The economic literature on vertical restraints and vertical integration provides no support for ex ante regulation arising out of the concern that a vertically integrating firm will harm competition through favoring its own content and discriminating against rivals.  Economic theory suggests that such arrangements may be anticompetitive in some instances, but also provides a plethora of pro-competitive explanations.  Lafontaine & Slade explain the state of the evidence in their recent survey paper in the Journal of Economic Literature:

We are therefore somewhat surprised at what the weight of the evidence is telling us. It says that, under most circumstances, profit-maximizing vertical-integration decisions are efficient, not just from the firms’ but also from the consumers’ points of view. Although there are isolated studies that contradict this claim, the vast majority support it. Moreover, even in industries that are highly concentrated so that horizontal considerations assume substantial importance, the net effect of vertical integration appears to be positive in many instances. We therefore conclude that, faced with a vertical arrangement, the burden of evidence should be placed on competition authorities to demonstrate that that arrangement is harmful before the practice is attacked. Furthermore, we have found clear evidence that restrictions on vertical integration that are imposed, often by local authorities, on owners of retail networks are usually detrimental to consumers. Given the weight of the evidence, it behooves government agencies to reconsider the validity of such restrictions.

John Maynard Keynes is quoted as saying “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”  Given the economic evidence on vertical integration, and the degree to which it conflicts with Clemons and Madhani’s priors on its competitive effects, one might expect them to support a rule that at least made an attempt to retain the consumer benefits of vertical integration.  The second noteworthy point about their post, however, is just how much their policy position diverges from the lessons gleaned from the economic literature described above.  The authors would ban vertical integration altogether!  In their own words:

For this reason, we believe that search engines should be forbidden to engage in vertical integration into comparison of goods and services, or into direct sale of goods and services. We feel that this should be blocked irrespective of the mechanism used to create the vertical integration; search engine providers should not be allowed to develop this vertical integration internally nor acquire it through acquisition, regardless of assurances offered to regulators of fair pricing or Chinese walls.

Understanding the competitive economics of vertical integration and vertical contractual arrangements can be quite complex because there are generally anticompetitive theories of the conduct as well as efficiency explanations.  One must be very careful with the facts in these cases to avoid conflating harm to rivals arising from competition on the merits, with harm to competition arising out of exclusionary conduct.  Misapplication of even this nuanced approach can generate significant consumer harm in the form of error costs and reduced incentive to innovate.  Reasonable minds can differ on where to draw the lines on these issues, where to impose safe harbors, and how to allocate burdens.  An outright ban on vertical integration has none of these virtues and rejects mainstream antitrust economics and available evidence.  The unifying theme holding together the two noteworthy points in these posts is that both imply sacrificing consumer welfare in the interest of firms.

Filed under: antitrust, doj, economics, google, technology

The GAO has recently issued a report on medical devices.  The thrust of the report is that “high-risk” medical devices do not receive enough scrutiny from the FDA and that recalls are not handled well.  This report and other evidence indicates that the FDA is likely to require more testing of devices.  As of now, most medical devices are approved on a fast track that requires significantly less testing than that required for new drugs.  (As I have discussed in a forthcoming Cato Journal article, medical devices are also subject to more immunity from state produce liability lawsuits.)

The GAO report is remarkable.  The GAO defines its mission as

“Our Mission is to support the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and to help improve the performance and ensure the accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the American people. We provide Congress with timely information that is objective, fact-based, nonpartisan, nonideological, fair, and balanced.”

But the report on medical devices is entirely unbalanced.  It deals only with procedures for approval and the recall process (both of which are judged inadequate.)  There is no discussion of either costs or benefits.   That is, no evidence is presented that there is any actual harm from the “flawed” approval and recall processes.  Even more importantly, there is no evidence presented about the benefits to consumers from easy and rapid approval of medical devices.

As is well known, virtually all economists who have studied the FDA drug approval process have concluded that it causes serious harm by delaying drugs.  The import of the GAO Report is that we should duplicate that harm with medical devices.  This is an odd and perverse way of providing a “benefit” to the American people.

Filed under: consumer protection, cost-benefit analysis, regulation, torts Tagged: FDA, Medical Devices

Russell Korobkin (UCLA) provocatively declares the ultimate victory of behavioral law and economics over neoclassical economics:

I am declaring victory in the battle for the methodological soul of the law and economics discipline. There is no need to continue to pursue the debate between behavioralists (that is, proponents of incorporating insights previously limited to the discipline of psychology into the economic analysis of legal rules and institutions) and the defenders of the traditional faith in individual optimization as a core analytical assumption of legal analysis.

Behavioral law and economics wins.  And its not close.  Korobkin continues:

[T]he battle to separate the economic analysis of legal rules and institutions from the straightjacket of strict rational choice assumptions has been won, at least by and large.  The fundamental methodological assumption of rational-choice economics, that individual behavior necessarily maximizes subjective expected utility, given constraints, has been largely discredited as an unyielding postulate for the analysis of legal policy.  Yes, such an assumption, even if inaccurate, simplifies the world, but it does so in an unhelpful way, much in the way that it is unhelpful for a drunk who has lost his car keys in the bushes to search under the streetlamp because that is where the light is.

The paper is remarkable on many levels, few of them positive.   I understand Professor Korobkin is trying to be provocative; in this he succeeds.  I — for one — am provoked.  But one problem with claims designed to provoke is that they may sacrifice other virtues in exchange for achieving the intended effect.  In this case, humility and accuracy are the first — but not the last — to go.   Indeed, Korobkin begins by acknowledging (and marginalizing) those would deny victory to the behaviorists while magnanimously offering terms of surrender:

Not everyone has been won over, of course, but enough have to justify granting amnesty to the captured and politely ignoring the unreconstructed.

Unreconstructed.  I guess I’ll have to take that one.  Given the skepticism I’ve expressed (with Douglas Ginsburg) concerning behavioral law and economics, and in particular, the abuse of the behavioral economics literature by legal scholars, it appears capture is unlikely.   Indeed, Judge Ginsburg and I are publishing a critique of the behavioral law and economics movement — Behavioral Law and Economics: Its Origins, Fatal Flaws, and Implications for Liberty — in the Northwestern Law Review in January 2012.   A fuller development of the case for skepticism about behavioral law and economics can wait for the article; it suffices for now to lay out a few of the most incredible aspects of Korobkin’s claims.

Perhaps the most incendiary aspect of Korobkin’s paper is not a statement, but an omission.  Korobkin claims that rational choice economics has been “largely discredited as an unyielding postulate for the analysis of legal policy” — and then provides no citation for this proposition.  None.  Not “scant support,” not “conflicting evidence” — Korobkin dismisses rational choice economics quite literally by fiat.  We are left to infer from the fact that legal scholars have frequently cited two important articles in the behavioral law and economics canon (the 1998 article A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics by Christine Jolls, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler and Law and Behavioral Science: Removing the Rationality Assumption from Law and Economics by Korobkin and Tom Ulen) that the behavioral approach has not only claimed victory in the marketplace for ideas but so decimated rational choice economics as to leave it discredited and “unhelpful.”  One shudders to consider the legion of thinkers chagrinned by Korobkin’s conclusive declaration.

Oh, wait.  The citations prove the behavioral law and economics is popular among legal scholars — and that’s about it.  I’ve no doubt that much is true.  If Korobkin’s claim was merely that behavioral law and economics has become very popular, I suppose that would be a boring paper, but the evidence would at least support the claim.  But the question is about relative quality of insight and analysis, not popularity.  Korobkin acknowledges as much, observing in passing that “Citation counts do not necessarily reflect academic quality, of course, but they do provide insight into what trends are popular within the legal academy.”   Undaunted, Korobkin moves seemlessly from popularity to the comparative claim that behavioral law and economics has “won” the battle over rational choice economics.   There is no attempt to engage intellectually on the merits concerning relative quality; truth, much less empirical validation, is not a mere matter of a headcount.

Even ceding the validity citations as a metric to prove Korobkin’s underlying claim — the comparative predictive power of two rival economic assumptions — what is the relative fraction of citations using rational choice economics to provide insights into legal institutions?  How many cites has Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law received?  Where is the forthcoming comparison of articles in the Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, American Economic Review, etc.?  One might find all sorts of interesting things by analyzing what is going on in the law and economics literature.  No doubt one would find that the behaviorists have made significant gains; but one expecting to find rational choice economics has been discredited is sure to to be disappointed by the facts.

Second, notice that the declaration of victory comes upon the foundation of citations to papers written in 1998 and 2000.  The debate over the law and economics of minimum resale price maintenance took nearly a century to settle in antitrust law, but behavioral law and economics has displaced and discredited all of rational choice economics in just over a decade?  The behavioral economics literature itself is, in scientific terms, very young.  The literature understandably continues to develop.  The theoretical and empirical project of identifying the conditions under which various biases are observed (and when they are not) is still underway and at a relatively early point in its development.  The over-reaching in Korobkin’s claim is magnified when one considers the relevant time horizon: impatience combined with wishful thinking is not a virtue in scientific discourse.

Third, it is fascinating that it is consistently the lawyers, and mostly law professors, rather than the behavioral economists, that wish to “discredit” rational choice economics.  Similarly, rational choice economists generally do not speak in such broad terms about discrediting behavioral economics as a whole.  Indeed, behavioral economists have observed that “it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address.  Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics.”  There are, of course, significant debates between theorists concerning welfare implications of models, from empiricists interpreting experiments and field evidence.  It is the law professors without economic training that want to discredit a branch of economics.  It is important to distinguish here between behavioral economics and behavioral law and economics, and between rational choice economics and its application to law.  No doubt there are applications of rational choice economics to law that overreach and warrant deserved criticism; equally, there are abuses of behavioral economics in the behavioral law and economics literature.  It is a very productive exercise, and one in which law professors might have a comparative advantage, to identify and criticize these examples of overreaching in application to law.   But with all due respect to Professor Korobkin, if rational choice economics is going to be discredited — a prospect I doubt given its success in so many areas of the law — some economists are going to have to be involved.

Fourth, in the midst of declaring victory over rational choice economics, Korobkin doesn’t even bother to define rational choice economics correctly.  Korobkin writes:

To the extent that legal scholars wish to premise their conclusions on the assumption that the relevant actors are perfect optimizers of their material self-interest, they bear the burden of persuasion that this assumption is realistic in the particular context that interests them.

Elsewhere, Korobkin writes:

My central thesis, which runs through the three parts of the article to follow, is that now that law and economics has discarded the “revealed preferences” assumption of neoclassical economics – that individual behavior necessarily maximizes subjective expected utility . . .

This isn’t the rational choice argument; this barely suffices as a caricature of the rational choice assumption underlying conventional microeconomic analysis.  Korobkin falls victim to the all-too-common misunderstanding that the rational choice assumption is a descriptive assumption about each individual’s behavior.  Not only is that obviously incorrect, and I suspect Korobkin knows it; anyone with even a passing familiarity with rational choice literature realizes that a host of economists — Friedman, Becker, Stigler, and Alchian, to name a few — have long been interested in, understood, and incorporated irrational economic behavior into microeconomics.  The rational choice assumption has never been about describing the individual decision-making processes of economic agents.  Perhaps a model with a different assumption, e.g. that all individuals exhibit loss aversion or optimism bias (or half of them, or a quarter, or whatever), will offer greater predictive power.  Perhaps not.  Economists all agree that predictive power is the criterion for model selection.   That is the right debate to have (see, e.g., here), not whether law professors find uses for the behavioral approach to argue for various forms of paternalistic intervention — and, for note, is still the case that this literature is used nearly uniformly for such purposes by law professors.  Korobkin’s method of declaring methodological victory on the behalf of behavioral law and economics while failing to accurately describe rational choice economics is a little bit like challenging your rival to “take it outside,” and then remaining inside and gloating about your victory while he is waiting for the fight outside.

Korobkin defends his provocative declaration of victory with the argument that it allows him to “avoid an extended discussion” of a number of claims he has already deemed appropriate to dismiss (mostly through conventional strawman approaches) in favor of focusing on new and exciting challenges for the behaviorists.  I offer two observations on the so-called benefits of declaring victory while the battle is still being waged.  The first is that avoiding evidence-based debate is a bug rather than a feature from the perspective of scientific method.  The second is a much more practical exhortation against premature celebration: you can lose while you admire the scoreboard.  Anyone who has ever played sports knows it is best to “play the whistle.”

One final observation.  I recall from Professor Korobkin’s website bio that he is a Stanford guy.  You’d think he’d be a little bit more sensitive to the risk of losing the game while the band prematurely celebrates victory.

Filed under: antitrust, behavioral economics, economics, law and economics, legal scholarship, scholarship

News comes that the DOJ and SEC are “examining whether some of the world’s biggest banks colluded to manipulate a key interest rate before and during the financial crisis, affecting trillions of dollars in loans and derivatives, say people familiar with the situation.”  The Wall Street Journal Reports that:

The inquiry, led by the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, is analyzing whether banks were understating their borrowing costs. At the time, banks were struggling with souring assets on balance sheets and questions about liquidity. A bank that borrowed at higher rates than peers would likely have signaled that its troubles could be worse than it had publicly admitted.

Roughly $10 trillion in loans and $350 trillion in derivatives are tied to Libor, which affects costs for everything from corporate bonds to car loans. If the rate was kept artificially low, borrowers likely weren’t harmed, though lenders could complain that the rates they charged for loans were too low. Derivatives contracts could be mispriced because of any manipulation of Libor.

Filed under: antitrust, banking, cartels, economics, financial regulation

I blogged a bit about the MetroPCS net neutrality complaint a few weeks ago.  The complaint, you may recall, targeted the MetroPCS menu of packages and pricing offered to its consumers.  The idea that MetroPCS, about one-tenth the size of Verizon, has market power is nonsense.  As my colleague Tom Hazlett explains, restrictions on MetroPCS in the name of net neutrality are likely to harm consumers, not help them:

Indeed, low-cost prepaid plans of MetroPCS are popular with users who want to avoid long-term contracts and are price sensitive. Half its customers are ‘cord cutters’, subscribers whose only phone is wireless and usage is intense. Voice minutes per month average about 2,000, more than double that of larger carriers.  The $40 plan is cheap because it’s inexpensively delivered using 2G technology.   It is not broadband (topping out, in third party reviews, at just 100 kbps), and has software and capacity issues. In general, voice over internet is not supported by the handsets and video streaming is not available on the network. The carrier deals with those limitations in three ways.

First, the $40 per month price tag extends a fat discount. Unlimited everything can cost $120 on faster networks. Second, it has also deployed new 4G technology, offering both a $40 tier similar to the 2G product (no video streaming), but also a pumped up version with video streaming, VoIP and everything else – without data caps – for $60 a month. Of course, this network has far larger capacity and is much zippier (reliable at 700 kbps).  PC World rated the full-blown 4G service “dirt cheap”.
Third, to upgrade the cheaper-than-dirt 2G experience, MetroPCS got Google – owner of YouTube – to compress their videos for delivery over the older network. This allowed the mobile carrier to extend unlimited wildly popular YouTube content to its lowest tier subscribers.  Busted! Favouring YouTube is said to violate neutrality. …

So much for the “consumer welfare” case for net neutrality in practice.  Of course, the FCC mandate is one of “public interest,” and not just consumer welfare.  So — perhaps another case can be made to defend the MetroPCS complaint?   Malkia Cyril from the Center for Media Justice offers just such a case in a recent blog post.  The problem with MetroPCS satisfying consumer demand for low-cost prepaid plans? Cyril argues that the “Lowering the price for partial Internet service while calling it “unlimited access” is a fraudulent gimmick that Metro PCS hopes will confuse low-income consumers into buying its phones,” and that it is “un-American to give low-income communities substandard Internet service that creates barriers to economic opportunity and democratic engagement.”

Cyril is wrong that competition for low-price plans makes low-income consumers worse off.  The claim is the same one that is often made in defense of restricting the access to low-income individuals to other products (and especially consumer credit) because their purchasing decisions cannot be trusted, i.e. the revealed preferences of those 8 million consumers should be substituted for by the Federal Communications Commission in this case.  This is precisely the type of claim for which a little bit of economic analysis can go a long way in shedding some light.

David Honig, co-founder of the liberal Minority Media & Telecommunications Council, makes the relevant points (HT: Hazlett):

One of the wireless carriers is offering three packages, all of VOIP-enabled (so they can get services like Skype) with free access to any lawful website, and all of them clearly labeled:

• Plan A: $40, with no multimedia streaming (that is, no movie downloads such as Netflix, porn, etc.)

• Plan B: $50, with metered multimedia streaming.

• Plan C: $60, with unlimited multimedia streaming.

Could you decide which of these three packages meets your needs?

Or is all this just too confusing? Cyril thinks so.

She writes that Plan A “will confuse low-income consumers” into buying this carrier’s cell phones because they won’t be able to figure out that “if you want the WHOLE Internet, you just have to pay more.”

Well, actually you don’t have to pay more. The most expensive option — Plan C — costs $40 less than the least expensive offering of any of the other carriers. And if you later discover you don’t like Plan A, you can upgrade to Plan B or Plan C with no penalty, or you can pay the $100 it would cost to get service similar to Plan C from competing carriers. And you can do that immediately, since none of these plans has an early termination fee. What’s wrong with paying less for the particular services you want?

Cyril is making a common mistake among us lefties when it comes to low income people — she is being paternalistic. Those poor poor people. They can’t think for themselves, so the government has to make decisions for them. In this case, Cyril argues, the FCC should outlaw Plan A (and maybe Plan B) and require every carrier to offer only full-menu service like Plan C. All this in the name of “net neutrality.”

If I’ve learned anything from my 45 years working with low income folks, it’s this: they’re intelligent and they’re resourceful. They have to be in order to survive. They don’t appreciate condescension or sloganeering in their name. And they have sense enough to know whether they’d rather use an extra $20 a month for movie downloads or for movie tickets — and would rather get discounts for services they do not want or need. …

What the FCC doesn’t need to do is increase costs for those who can least afford it. As long as there’s full transparency, low income people ought to be able to choose Plan A, B or C. Low income people — the underserved — don’t need the FCC to decide, for them, how they can spend their money.

Well put.

This relates to an important economic point that the proponents of these types of regulation often miss, including in the context of lawyer licensing, but also with respect to the hundreds of state and local regulations impacting hundreds of industries that create barriers to entry in the provision of medical services, dental services, hairdressing, etc.  The introduction of lower quality products provides greater choice and significant economic value.   The fact that not all consumers demand (or can afford) premium brands and services does not mean that consumers are exploited.   Recall Milton Friedman’s statement that lawyer licensing is very much like requiring consumers desiring an automobile to purchase a Cadillac.  In this case, low-income consumers would bear the brunt of a restriction against the type of plan offered by MetroPCS.

There is a longstanding debate over the differences between the FCC’s “public interest” standard and the “consumer welfare” standard used in traditional antitrust analysis.  Sometimes, the two appear to conflict.  Sometimes, as is the case here, with the benefit of economics it is clear the two standards converge.  Here’s hoping the FCC doesn’t take the bait.

Filed under: antitrust, behavioral economics, economics, net neutrality

One additional observation on the WSJ story Paul mentioned.  Much has been written about the strained relationship between the FTC and DOJ in antitrust matters.  There has, of course, never been a more descriptive and entertaining version of these tensions than the one offered by former Chairman and now Commissioner Kovacic who observed that the so-called sister agencies amounted to “an archipelago of policy makers with very inadequate ferry service between the islands” where “too many instances when you go to visit those islands the inhabitants come out with sticks and torches and try to chase you away.”

Its been awhile since that particular description, but the quotes in the Journal article really suggest a remarkable level of tension between the agencies.  Consider:

• Commissioner Rosch describing the DOJ as “an arm of the administration,” that “can and will enforce the antitrust laws only insofar as that is consistent with administration policy;”  or
• Even going so far as to question whether AAG Varney was able to take an unbiased view of health care related matters because of her past representation of the American Hospital Association.

Fairly serious stuff.  Perhaps the Commissioner and AAG just need some topic upon which they can both agree?

The inter-agency clearance fights, and especially the high-profile ones that bring out the sticks and torches, significantly undermine the mission of antitrust enforcement institutions.  Commissioner Kovacic closes the article with the basic, but critical point:   “The fact and appearance of a contest are bad for the coherence,” says Mr. Kovacic. “If you develop a perception that you’re going to get different outcomes depending on where [a deal] goes, your system suffers.”

 

Filed under: antitrust, clearance, doj, federal trade commission

The Wall Street Journal reports major conflicts between the DOJ and the FTC over antitrust jurisdiction.  There are only two of them, and they are not subject to rules against collusion and open agreements.  Nonetheless, they can’t get along and they cannot decide on market division.    Maybe they will take this as information about difficulties of collusion, even in duopoly situations.

Filed under: antitrust, cartels, federal trade commission

Josh and I have just completed a white paper on search neutrality/search bias and the regulation of search engines.  The paper is this year’s first in the ICLE Antitrust & Consumer Protection White Paper Series:

If Search Neutrality Is the Answer, What’s the Question?

 

Geoffrey A. Manne

(Lewis & Clark Law School and ICLE)

and

Joshua D. Wright

(George Mason Law School & Department of Economics and ICLE)

In this paper we evaluate both the economic and non-economic costs and benefits of search bias. In Part I we define search bias and search neutrality, terms that have taken on any number of meanings in the literature, and survey recent regulatory concerns surrounding search bias. In Part II we discuss the economics and technology of search. In Part III we evaluate the economic costs and benefits of search bias. We demonstrate that search bias is the product of the competitive process and link the search bias debate to the economic and empirical literature on vertical integration and the generally-efficient and pro-competitive incentives for a vertically integrated firm to discriminate in favor of its own content. Building upon this literature and its application to the search engine market, we conclude that neither an ex ante regulatory restriction on search engine bias nor the imposition of an antitrust duty to deal upon Google would benefit consumers. In Part V we evaluate the frequent claim that search engine bias causes other serious, though less tangible, social and cultural harms. As with the economic case for search neutrality, we find these non-economic justifications for restricting search engine bias unconvincing, and particularly susceptible to the well-known Nirvana Fallacy of comparing imperfect real world institutions with romanticized and unrealistic alternatives

Search bias is not a function of Google’s large share of overall searches. Rather, it is a feature of competition in the search engine market, as evidenced by the fact that its rivals also exercise editorial and algorithmic control over what information is provided to consumers and in what manner. Consumers rightly value competition between search engine providers on this margin; this fact alone suggests caution in regulating search bias at all, much less with an ex ante regulatory schema which defines the margins upon which search providers can compete. The strength of economic theory and evidence demonstrating that regulatory restrictions on vertical integration are costly to consumers, impede innovation, and discourage experimentation in a dynamic marketplace support the conclusion that neither regulation of search bias nor antitrust intervention can be justified on economic terms. Search neutrality advocates touting the non-economic virtues of their proposed regime should bear the burden of demonstrating that they exist beyond the Nirvana Fallacy of comparing an imperfect private actor to a perfect government decision-maker, and further, that any such benefits outweigh the economic costs.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PAPER

 

Filed under: announcements, antitrust, economics, error costs, essential facilities, exclusionary conduct, google, law and economics, markets, monopolization, technology, truth on the market Tagged: antitrust, foundem, google, search, search bias, Search Engines, search neutrality, tradecomet, Vertical integration