In limiting the patent term to twenty years, Congress sought to use competition to make patented products available to the public at low prices once inventors have reaped the fruits of the exclusivity provided by the patent grant. But competition has in practice proven an unreliable method of...

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...

The information age is replacing the Invisible Hand with an algorithmic hand. Where once markets were governed by uniform prices determined for large groups of anonymous consumers by impersonal forces of supply and demand, today there is increasingly no such thing as a market price. Instead,...

From surge pricing by Uber to last-minute fare increases by airlines, the use of price hikes to determine who should gain access to scarce resources has swept the business world in recent years, enabled by the easy access to information on what consumers are willing to pay, and the power of...