Maurice E. Stucke

Is It Time to Recreate the E-rate Program?

In this Essay, we review AT&T Inc.’s proposed

Reconsidering Antitrust's Goals

39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA, Inc., under federal merger law, under the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission’s 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, and with a focus on possible remedies. We find, under a rule of law approach, that the proposed acquisition is presumptively anticompetitive, and the merging parties in their public disclosures have failed to overcome this presumption. Next we find that under the Merger Guidelines, there is reason to believe that the transaction may result in higher prices to consumers under several different plausible theories. Finally, we turn to the question of possible remedies. We conclude that there is a high likelihood that divestitures will not solve the competitive problems, and make the case for enjoining the acquisition.

Behavioral Antitrust and Monopolization

Antitrust policy today is an anomaly. On the one hand, antitrust is thriving internationally. On the other hand, antitrust’s influence has diminished domestically. Over the past thirty years, there have been fewer antitrust investigations and private actions. Today the Supreme Court complains about antitrust suits, and places greater faith in the antitrust function being subsumed in a regulatory framework. So what happened to the antitrust movement in the United States?Two import factors contributed to antitrust policy’s domestic decline. The first is salience, especially the salience of the U.S. antitrust goals. In the past thirty years, enforcers and courts abandoned antitrust’s political, social, and moral goals, in their quest for a single economic goal. Second antitrust policy increasingly relied on an incomplete, distorted conception of competition. Adopting the Chicago School’s simplifying assumptions of self-correcting markets composed of rational, self-interested market participants, the courts and enforcers sacrificed important political, social, and moral values to promote certain economic beliefs.With the anger over taxpayer bailouts for firms deemed too-big-and-integral-to-fail, the wealth inequality that accelerated over the past thirty years, and the current budget cuts and austerity measures, the United States is ripe for a new antitrust policy cycle. This Article first summarizes the quest during the past 30 years for a single economic goal. It discusses why this quest failed. Four oft-cited economic goals (ensuring an effective competitive process, promoting consumer welfare, maximizing efficiency, and ensuring economic freedom) never unified antitrust analysis. After discussing why it is unrealistic to believe that a single well-defined antitrust objective exists, the Article proposes how to account antitrust’s multiple policy objectives into the legal framework. It outlines a blended goal approach, and the benefits of this approach in providing better legal standards and reviving antitrust’s relevance.

The Curious Case of Competition and Quality

One hot topic is whether Google has violated the antitrust laws. Another important topic is how behavioral economics can enrich antitrust policy. This article examines two implications of behavioral economics on antitrust monopolization law. The article first discusses trial-and-error learning as an entry barrier. This is timely given the current debate over the entry barriers of the search engine market. The article next discusses behavioral exploitation to maintain a monopoly. The behavioral economics literature can help explain the European Commissions tying claims against Microsoft, why the Commissions original remedy failed, and the benefits and risks of the Commissions remedy involving its subsequent prosecution of Microsoft over Internet browsers.

When Competition Fails to Optimize Quality: A Look at Search Engines

Alongside the consideration of price, competition authorities recognize that quality can be as, if not more, important in some markets. But as competition authorities also recognize, identifying the dimensions of competition important to many consumers is difficult. Even when these dimensions of quality are identified, measuring them represents additional challenges. To circumvent these challenges, competition authorities rely on several heuristics when assessing a merger’s, cartel’s or monopolistic restraint’s impact on quality. Often the heuristics work well for the competition authorities.Our paper, however, identifies several scenarios where these heuristics break down, when competition and quality are not positively correlated, and when an increase in competition can actually reduce consumer welfare. We also identify two necessary, but not sufficient, conditions that are common to every scenario. With these two conditions in mind, we provide instances when an increase in competition will not increase quality (when one would expect it should). We also provide instances when an increase in competition will lead to quality degradation.

Artificial Intelligence & Collusion: When Computers Inhibit Competition

The European Commission’s Statement of Objections forms the latest addition to the ongoing debate on the possible misuse of Google’s position in the search engine market. The scholarly debate, however, has largely been over the exclusionary effects of search degradation. Less attention has been attributed to the dimension of quality – whether and how a search engine, faced with rivals, could degrade quality on the free side. We set out to address this fundamental issue: With the proliferation of numerous web search engines and their free usage and availability, could any search engine degrade quality? We begin our analysis with a review of the network effects that may impact the relative power of a search engine. We next identify three necessary, but not sufficient, variables for quality degradation to occur in search results. With these three variables in mind, we consider instances when a search engine could degrade quality despite competition from rival engines.

Is Intent Relevant

The development of self-learning and independent computers has long captured our imagination. The HAL 9000 computer, in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, assured, “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” Machine learning raises many challenging legal and ethical questions as to the relationship between man and machine, humans’ control -- or lack of it -- over machines, and accountability for machine activities. While these issues have long captivated our interest, few would envision the day when these developments (and the legal and ethical challenges raised by them) would become an antitrust issue. Sophisticated computers are central to the competitiveness of present and future markets. With the accelerating development of AI, they are set to change the competitive landscape and the nature of competitive restraints. As pricing mechanisms shift to computer pricing algorithms, so too will the types of collusion. We are shifting from the world where executives expressly collude in smoke-filled hotel rooms to a world where pricing algorithms continually monitor and adjust to each other’s prices and market data. Our paper addresses these developments and considers the application of competition law to an advanced ‘computerised trade environment.’ After discussing the way in which computerised technology is changing the competitive landscape, we explore four scenarios where AI can foster anticompetitive collusion and the legal and ethical challenges each scenario raises.

The Implications of Behavioral Antitrust

The role of intent in federal antitrust cases has been characterized as “unsettled” and “controversial.” Many lower courts, scholars, and practitioners recognize that intent evidence is relevant in antitrust cases. But jurists and scholars oriented by neoclassical economic theory disagree. Using the developments in the behavioral economics literature, this Article reexamines the relevancy of intent evidence in civil antitrust cases. The analysis is organized around two issues: First is intent legally relevant in civil antitrust cases? Second if intent evidence is relevant, for what purpose? Intent evidence, this Article concludes, is relevant. The behavioral economics experiments confirm what many have long accepted: intent matters. Greed does not always motivate us. Greed is not necessary for a market economy to thrive. Competition need not be zero-sum warfare. But the literature has two important implications. First, intent may be helpful, but to a lesser degree than some courts and scholars assume, in assessing the likely anti-competitive effects. Second, intent evidence can be more important than courts may otherwise assume under neoclassical theory. People rely on intent when coding and punishing behavior as unfair and unreasonable, which in turn can promote a market economy and overall societal welfare.

Looking at the Monopsony in the Mirror

Behavioral economics is now mainstream. It is also timely. The financial crisis raised important issues of market failure, weak regulation, moral hazard, and our lack of understanding about how many markets actually operate. As behavioral economics (with its more realistic assumptions of human behavior) goes mainstream in academia and the business world, one expects lawyers and economists to bring the current economic thinking to the competition agencies. How should the competition agencies respond? This paper examines how competition authorities can consider the implications of behavioral economics on four levels: first as a gap filler, i.e., to help explain “real world” evidence that neoclassical economic theory cannot explain; second to assess critically the assumptions of specific antitrust policies, such as merger review and cartel prosecutions; third to revisit three fundamental antitrust questions, namely what is competition, what are the goals of competition law, and what should be the legal standards to promote those goals; and fourth, to assess how behavioral economics will affect the degree of convergence/divergence of competition law among the over 100 jurisdictions with competition laws today.

Two Artificial Neural Networks Meet in an Online Hub and Change the Future (Of Competition, Market Dynamics and Society)

Although still a distant second to monopoly, buyer power and monopsony are hot topics in the antitrust community. Despite the increasing interest in monopsony and buyer power, relatively few cases have actually been brought. Given the relatively few antitrust cases, the legal standards for monopsony claims are less developed than for monopoly claims. In recent years, courts, competition agencies, and scholars in addressing monopsony begin with a simple premise: monopsony is the mirror image of monopoly. But as this Article contends, courts and agencies should be careful when importing monopolization standards for monopsony cases. What works for monopolization claims may not necessarily work for monopsony claims. This Article discusses two key issues: first, how much market share must defendant possess to be a monopsony? If courts and agencies assume that monopsony is the mirror image of monopoly, should the agencies and courts use the same market share thresholds for monopsonization claims as in monopolization claims? Second, should agencies and courts use consumer harm as a threshold screen for monopsony claims?