Firms can now charge each shopper a different price, and regulators worry that the gains will flow from consumers to companies. But personalized pricing has two built-in limits: shoppers learn to hide how much they want things, and cheap purchases can be resold, writes Nursultan Mukhtaruly.

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In new analysis, Madhav Parikh examines how competition among banks in the United States shapes the way monetary policy reaches depositors. Tracking U.S. banks from late 2021 through mid-2026, he finds that banks in more concentrated local markets repriced their deposit interest rates less than banks in competitive markets, both as the Fed raised rates and as it cut them.

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The Digital Markets Act establishes central rules and enforcement for digital platforms across the European Union, but allows decentralized private enforcement on the national level. In new research, Lena Hornkohl and Barbara Justen reflect on how two recent German court cases show how national litigation can make the DMA more effective, but also highlight the need for mechanisms that aid in consistent interpretation.

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Consumers are anxious about the economy, and it’s due not only to inflation but to market power that raises prices and reduces quality, variety, and innovation. Policymakers’ prescriptions for resolving the cost-of-living crisis have mostly ignored the role of antitrust policy, but waning competition is at the heart of these problems, writes Diana L. Moss.

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In new research, Nandini Gupta and Swarnodeep Homroy show that firms in the United States are choosing politically-aligned suppliers to insure their supply chains against disruption. Aligned relationships are markedly more resilient when shocks hit, but the insurance is paid for in higher input costs and less innovation.

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In new research, Elettra Bietti compares the efficacy of the two legal avenues that have arisen to restrain social media’s ability to monopolize people’s time and attention: antitrust policy and product liability for consumer harm. Looking at the results of two recent Meta cases, she finds that product liability has proven the most capable in introducing the frictions needed to reduce social media’s addictive design.

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The Chicago School believed that markets operate best when they are left to organize themselves, and that state regulation only disrupts this process to the detriment of social welfare. Brazil’s Competition Act for Digital Markets, now under legislative debate, reveals the myopia of the Chicago School’s organizing principle and instead supports the heterodox institutionalist position that state activity, whether through activity or abstention, is always at the heart of market formation, writes Diogo Rosenthal Coutinho.

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The United States government launched the American AI Exports Program to help American firms win contracts from international customers. In a bid to enhance international competitiveness, the program risks stifling domestic competition, writes Javaid Sofi.

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In new research, Nicholas Short, Sophie Hill, and Jacob Brown examine "ideological capture": regulatory capture that works not through lobbying but through experts defining what goals and values regulators may consider. Surveying the public alongside antitrust lawyers, they find the consumer welfare standard marginalizes important public concerns, like the risk of increased layoffs or more lobbying power.

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Jolted by the Great Depression of the 1930s, Thurman Arnold devised an anti-monopoly industrial policy for the United States Justice Department that breathed fresh life into a then-moribund Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Arnold’s jurisprudence built on Adam Smith’s discovery that market-making could promote national security and forestall civil unrest. Smith’s insights had informed the industrial policy of Alexander Hamilton, who laid the groundwork in the 1790s for the country’s economic development. Edward H. Levi brought Arnold’s pragmatic anti-monopolism to the University of Chicago. Here, ironically, Arnoldian jurisprudence would be transmogrified into the doctrinaire company-over-country market fundamentalism of the Chicago School of Economics. Today, writes Richard R. John, as we envision for the 21st century a new pro-market, pro-freedom, pro-national security industrial policy, it is worth recalling how U. S. economic development took the form that it did, why the Chicago School repudiated the enduring wisdom of Adam Smith, and what this portends for the world of today.

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