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Full-Text Articles in Antitrust and Trade Regulation
Nascent Competitors, C. Scott Hemphill, Tim Wu
Nascent Competitors, C. Scott Hemphill, Tim Wu
Faculty Scholarship
A nascent competitor is a firm whose prospective innovation represents a serious threat to an incumbent. Protecting such competition is a critical mission for antitrust law, given the outsized role of unproven outsiders as innovators and the uniquely potent threat they often pose to powerful entrenched firms. In this Article, we identify nascent competition as a distinct analytical category and outline a program of antitrust enforcement to protect it. We make the case for enforcement even where the ultimate competitive significance of the target is uncertain, and explain why a contrary view is mistaken as a matter of policy and …
"Section 5 And 'Unfair Methods Of Competition': Protecting Competition Or Increasing Uncertainty?", Tim Wu
"Section 5 And 'Unfair Methods Of Competition': Protecting Competition Or Increasing Uncertainty?", Tim Wu
Faculty Scholarship
Since the late 1980s, Section 5 of the FTC Act has come to center on a certain kind of case, the so-called anticompetitive “scheme” featuring extraordinary and nefarious conduct – like gaming a standards process, rigging industry tests, that sort of thing. Deception, fraud, bad-faith and oppressive action are typical. This kind of self-restraint has, to its credit, yielded a focus on cases where the conduct is extraordinary, an anticompetitive intent is obvious and the harm is substantial. At this point, the self-imposed limits on Section 5 enforcement are extensive enough that a critic could fairly accuse the agency of …
Does Google Content Degrade Google Search? Experimental Evidence, Michael Luca, Tim Wu, Sebastian Couvidat, Daniel Frank
Does Google Content Degrade Google Search? Experimental Evidence, Michael Luca, Tim Wu, Sebastian Couvidat, Daniel Frank
Faculty Scholarship
While Google is known primarily as a search engine, it has increasingly developed and promoted its own content as an alternative to results from other websites. By prominently displaying Google content in response to search queries, Google is able to use its dominance in search to gain customers for this content. This may reduce consumer welfare if the internal content is inferior to organic search results. In this paper, we provide a legal and empirical analysis of this practice in the domain of online reviews. We first identify the conditions under which universal search would be considered anticompetitive. We then …