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Full-Text Articles in Law
Facebook, Welfare, And Natural Monopoly: A Quantitative Analysis Of Antitrust Remedies, Felix B. Chang, Seth Benzell
Facebook, Welfare, And Natural Monopoly: A Quantitative Analysis Of Antitrust Remedies, Felix B. Chang, Seth Benzell
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
This Article advances a novel theoretical model for assessing policy interventions against Facebook. As prosecutors barrel forward against digital platforms, soon it will fall upon courts and, eventually, regulators to devise remedies. We argue that any sensible solution must include quantification of the welfare effects on the platform’s various constituents. Our model prioritizes the effects upon total societal welfare—or, in economists’ terms, social welfare. Applied to Facebook, the model calculates social welfare as the sum of four components: (i) consumer welfare; (ii) advertising profits; (iii) tax revenues; and (iv) the value of a large user base.
Drawing on surveys of …
Mining The Harvard Caselaw Access Project, Felix B. Chang, Erin Mccabe, James Lee
Mining The Harvard Caselaw Access Project, Felix B. Chang, Erin Mccabe, James Lee
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
This Essay illustrates how machine learning can disrupt legal scholarship through the algorithmic extraction and analysis of big data. Specifically, we utilize data from Harvard Law School’s Caselaw Access Project to model how courts tackle two thorny question in antitrust: the measure of market power and the balance between antitrust and regulation.
Financial Market Bottlenecks And The 'Openness' Mandate, Felix B. Chang
Financial Market Bottlenecks And The 'Openness' Mandate, Felix B. Chang
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
Financial market infrastructures (“FMIs”), which facilitate the execution of financial transactions, exhibit such strong economies of scale that they are natural monopolies. In each market, production is controlled by a few dominant players. Federal courts have traditionally checked the abuses of natural monopolies under the Sherman Act. Yet recent Supreme Court decisions have reined in the role of antitrust in regulated industries, where administrative bodies set and enforce standards. To this effect, financial regulations require certain FMIs to grant open, nondiscriminatory access to users.
This Article argues that weak “openness” regulations must be buttressed by their antitrust counterpart — specifically, …