Law and Economics Commons^™

Common Ownership And Executive Incentives: The Implausibility Of Compensation As An Anticompetitive Mechanism, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Mutual funds, pension funds and other institutional investors are a growing presence in U.S. equity markets, and these investors frequently hold large stakes in shares of competing companies. Because these common owners might prefer to maximize the values of their portfolios of companies, rather than the value of individual companies in isolation, this new reality has lead to a concern that companies in concentrated industries with high degrees of common ownership might compete less vigorously with each other than they otherwise would. But what mechanism would link common ownership with reduced competition? Some commentators argue that one of the most …

Digital Platforms And Antitrust Law, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is about "big data" and antitrust law. Big data, for my purposes, refers to digital platforms that enable the discovery and sharing of information by consumers, and the harvesting and analysis of consumer data by the platform. The obvious example of such a platform is Google. The big platforms owe their market dominance not to anticompetitive conduct, but to economies of scale. This Article discusses three types of anticompetitive conduct associated with digital platforms: kill zone expropriation, acquisition of nascent rivals, and denial of access to data. There is nothing so unusual about digital platforms that would require …

Blind Spot: The Attention Economy And The Law, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Human attention, valuable and limited in supply, is a resource. It has become commonplace, especially in the media and technology industries, to speak of an "attention economy" and of competition in "attention markets.” There is even an attentional currency, the "basic attention token," which purports to serve as a medium of exchange for user attention. Firms like Facebook and Google, which have emerged as two of the most important firms in the global economy, depend nearly exclusively on attention markets as a business model.

Yet despite the well-recognized commercial importance of attention markets, antitrust and consumer protection authorities have struggled …