Steven Salop explores the presumptions and evidence that could undergird Commissioner Melissa Holyoak’s preferred “Raising Rivals’ Cost” approach to the enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act.| ProMarket
Reviewing the literature pioneered by Richard Gilbert and David Newbery, Steven Salop finds that the recent settlement between sports-streaming services Fubo and the Venu Sports joint venture of Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery was fully predictable. But the settlement takes on greater complexity in light of the termination of joint venture a week later […]| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop writes that only Google’s full divestiture of its Android operating system can avoid incentives on the part of Android and Google to preference Google’s apps, including its search engine, and stifle competition.| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop recommends that the next presidential administration continue to focus competition policy on protecting against adverse labor market outcomes. He suggests several policies the administration might pursue to achieve these benefits.| ProMarket
Critics of the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit last week to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger claim that the agency incorrectly limits the relevant buyer-side market to unionized grocery workers. Steve C. Salop argues that the critics are wrong, and that standard antitrust analysis shows the FTC has it right.| ProMarket
Business and economic thought instituted at least since the Reagan revolution in the United States have promoted firms’ narrowly self-interested, profit-maximizing conduct even at the expense of consumers and workers. This paradigm leads to social distrust and insufficient cooperation. Steven C. Salop explains this distortion and proposes 10 guidelines by which firms can self-moderate their behavior to produce prosocial outcomes.| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop evaluates the final version of the 2023 Merger Guidelines on vertical merger analysis and certain rebuttal arguments. He finds that the final Guidelines successfully incorporate developments in the economic scholarship and update antitrust enforcement with the tools to analyze non-horizontal mergers in an increasingly digital economy.| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop argues that as part of any remedy outcome from the Google Search case, Google cannot be permitted to enter agreements with web browser operators such as Apple to share ad revenue from online searches, even without the condition of setting Google Search as the default choice. To do so would continue to […]| ProMarket
Steven Salop is a Professor of Economics and Law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, where he teaches antitrust law and economics. His research and consulting focuses on antitrust, competition, and regulation. He has written numerous articles in various areas of antitrust and competition which take a modern “Post-Chicago” approach. These include a number of articles with various co-authors on the competitive effects of vertical mergers. Professor Salop has also writ...| ProMarket
Steven C. Salop writes that the Biden administration oversaw a paradigm shift in antitrust, but it was the full adoption of the ideas of the Post-Chicago school, whose intellectual influence has countered Chicago since the 1980s, rather than the empowerment of the Anti-Monopoly or Neo-Brandeisian school of thought. This latter school of thought played an important role by motivating increased enforcement and corralling political support, even if it did not lead to cases that could not have be...| ProMarket
Steve Salop explores the basis for warranting strong remedies in the Google Search case and the set of remedies Judge Amit Mehta might consider for restoring competition in the search market by jump-starting the competitive process.| ProMarket
A key distinction in economic viewpoints that goes oft-unnoticed is between pro-business and pro-market. A good bellwether to where someone stands on the pro-business/market continuum is his/her stance on antitrust policy: pro-business usually favors incumbents, while pro-market calls for aggressive antitrust enforcement to facilitate competition. “I would not dispute that even a monopoly-ridden market would be preferable to any economic system trying to operate without any kind of a market...| ProMarket
