Attacks on Amazon, Google, and Facebook have tended to ignore a key lesson of the theory of monopolistic competition: that big is not always bad. A monopolist grows large because consumers prefer the firm’s products. The only question for the antitrust laws is whether consumers prefer the...

The advance of the information age will allow firms to engage in personalized pricing, a form of price discrimination that is profitable for firms, but unambiguously harmful to consumers. Antitrust can protect consumers from personalized pricing—also called perfect price discrimination—by...

Economists have long recognized that advertising has two main functions: to inform and to persuade. In the information age, the information function is obsolete, because consumers can get all the product information they want from a quick Google search. That makes virtually all advertising today...

It is in the nature of technological advance to centralize control over production and divorce it from the consumer, placing the consumer at the mercy of the producer. For most of human history, the fight for consumer rights was a fight for democracy, because the state is the ultimate...