The Neo-Brandeisians and Chicago School have employed different statistics to show respectively that markets are both concentrated and not concentrated, leaving Americans in the dark about who really holds corporate power. The evidence only looks contradictory due to the failure of American antitrust scholarship and regulation to understand how conglomerates collect market power across many neighboring markets, through what Paul Friederiszick calls “adjacent market takeovers.” This strategy can make firms more efficient, but it can also raise prices and weaken competition even as each individual market still looks competitive, he writes, drawing on his new paper, “The Conglomerate Power Puzzle.”

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Sarah Kreps argues that elected officials should be cautious of immediately rejecting proposals for local data centers. Instead, officials should capture potential benefits and protect residents by negotiating for better terms.

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The transaction fees that businesses incur using credit and debit cards cost Americans billions of dollars each year. Despite the availability of alternative, cheaper account-to-account options that cut out the middleman, Americans have been slow to move away from card payment systems due to market mechanisms that hide the true costs of card transactions to consumers, writes Eli Orbach.

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Two recent court rulings on casino-hotels using a shared software to fix prices reveal the importance of information exchanges as a super plus factor: an indicator of illegal conspiracy to limit trade. Roger D. Blair and Javier D. Donna discuss how these court cases and other recent lawsuits elucidate the role of the information exchange and the two vectors that determine its strength as a plus factor: data sensitivity and a give-to-get understanding among firms that if they shared their data, competitors would do the same.

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Jeremy Pilaar and Albert (Haotian) Wang present the weaknesses in current legislative reforms targeting pharmacy benefit managers. They suggest that lawmakers focus on reining in PBM income, limiting fees that PBMs can charge, and empowering state legislative efforts.  

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Startups in Africa rely heavily on an equity market dominated by foreign investors and founders who studied or worked outside the continent. In new research, Emanuele Colonnelli, Marcio Cruz, Mariana Pereira-Lopez, Tommaso Porzio and Chun Zhao show that this dynamic exists because local equity is expensive, the pool of local entrepreneurs seeking out funding is small, and local entrepreneurs have limited access to foreign investors.

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The artificial intelligence industry recently called for an antitrust exemption to coordinate self-regulation as the risks their models pose to the internet and society grow. Industry-wide self-regulation might well violate antitrust law and would certainly give Big Tech too much power with too little supervision. In the absence of federal action, states can and should provide the required antitrust immunity to enforce safety rules so long as they oversee the conduct, write Noah Hoffman and Fiona Scott Morton.

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Alberto Heimler argues that antitrust authorities should focus on whether market power allows one party to exploit relationship-specific sunk investments made by another and how that undermines potential innovation, investments, and competition. 

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In new research, Markus Eberhardt, Giovanni Facchini, and Valeria Rueda find that a growing share of PhD graduates from top U.S. economics programs are leaving academia, looking beyond North America, and moving into the private sector, especially towards the tech industry.

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All merger reviews come with uncertainty, but the culture among courts, consultants, and regulators is to pretend that sophisticated modeling can eliminate uncertainty, and thus any uncertainty reflects poor econometric analysis. Creating standards of uncertainty would produce more honest analysis and better competition outcomes, writes Bart Lahcen.

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