Law and Economics Commons^™

Antitrust And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Are large digital platforms that deal directly with consumers “winner take all,” or natural monopoly, firms? That question is surprisingly complex and does not produce the same answer for every platform. The closer one looks at digital platforms the less they seem to be winner-take-all. As a result, competition can be made to work in most of them. Further, antitrust enforcement, with its accommodation of firm variety, is generally superior to any form of statutory regulation that generalizes over large numbers.

Assuming that an antitrust violation is found, what should be the remedy? Breaking up large firms subject to extensive …

Regulating The Food Truck Industry: An Illustration Of Proximity And Sanitation Regulations, Nicholas Alvarez

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Manny Hernandez, a Chicago food truck owner, would wake up in the middle of the night and slowly travel by foot around downtown Chicago carrying a 200-foot rope. The rope was used to measure the distance from the doors of brick-and-mortar restaurants to possible parking locations for his food truck. A Chicago ordinance prohibited food trucks from operating within 200 feet of the front door of any brick-and-mortar restaurant. Furthermore, Manny could not just find one spot; he needed to find many spots because Chicago law also stated that food trucks were only allowed to park at one location for …

Can Permissionless Blockchains Avoid Governance And The Law?, Eric Alston, Wilson Law, Ilia Murtazashvili, Martin Weiss

Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies

Permissionless (or public) blockchain networks are a new form of decentralized private governance in the digital sphere. Though legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of blockchain, existing research using legal and institutional perspectives leaves blockchain governance as something of a black box. We provide a more granular analysis, finding that blockchain governance operates on four distinct levels. Governance at the protocol layer involves discrete institutional design choices intended to constrain network members’ incentives in an ongoing sense. Subsidiary governance arises from the need for communities to draft protocol updates and from the fact that governance protocol …

The Irony Of Health Care’S Public Option, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

The idea of a public health insurance option is at least a half century old, but has not yet had its day in the limelight. This chapter explains why if that moment ever comes, health care’s public option will fall short of expectations that it will provide a differentiated, meaningful alternative to private health insurance and will spur health insurance competition.

Health care’s public option bubbled up in its best-known form in California in the early 2000s and got increasing mainstream attention in the lead up to the 2010 health reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The …