The Federal Trade Commission recently voted unanimously to close the portion of its antitrust investigation into Google's search practices without filing a complaint. The agency apparently concluded that the firm's practice of favoring its own content in search results did not violate U.S....

Blockchain may transform transactions the same way the Internet altered the dissemination and nature of information. If that were to be the case, all relationships between companies would change, including prohibited ones such as collusive agreements. For that reason, the stakes are crucial and...

For more than half a century, courts have viewed certain uses of intellectual property (IP) as misuse, rendering the IP unenforceable until the misuse is purged. The doctrine began with patents, but courts have recently extended it to copyrights. In most cases, it reflects concern over...

Computational antitrust promises not only to help antitrust agencies preside over increasingly complex and dynamic markets, but also to provide companies with the tools to assess and enforce compliance with antitrust laws. If research in the space has been primarily dedicated to supporting...

We examine the consumer-welfare implications of Google’s project to scan a large proportion of the world’s books into digital form and to make these works accessible to consumers through Google Book Search (GBS). In response to a class action alleging copyright infringement, Google has...

Competitors embroiled in a patent dispute always prefer to preserve and share monopoly profits, even if the patent is likely invalid. Antitrust has come to embrace a policy that requires horizontal settlements to be "proportional" in the sense that their anticompetitive effects are commensurate...

When rivals settle a patent dispute, they prefer to preserve the full monopoly profit, even if the patent is very likely invalid. The literature advocates comparing settlement outcomes to the expected result of litigation, but has not identified a comprehensive means of doing this. We show that...

Planet earth is host to a dazzling variety of living organisms. This diversity of life, or – biodiversity, is vital to the survival and prosperity of humanity, supplying such vital amenities as food, clothing, shelter, natural biochemicals useful in medicine, industry, and agriculture, and...