Antitrust guarantees a particular distribution of wealth between consumers and producers. Big data allows firms with pricing power to identify the highest price a consumer is willing to pay for a good and charge it to her. The practice upends the current distribution of wealth by allowing firms...

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...

Law and economics are both hostile to liability for exposure to risk without actual harm. Harm is the foundation of civil remedies. Economics teaches that adequate compensation in the event of harm eliminates risk, obviating the need for compensation for exposure. I show that if there is risk...

Antitrust prohibits cartels from charging monopoly prices but does not prohibit monopolies from charging monopoly prices. Antitrust does not ban monopoly pricing by monopolies because it thinks that unless a monopoly takes affirmative action to exclude competitors, competitors will enter the...

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 news industry in the United States faces a funding crisis because the tech giants, particularly Google and Facebook, have acceded to the advertising monopolies once enjoyed by the newspaper industry itself. Despite the best efforts of the news industry to paint the tech giants as rapacious...

If a firm is a nexus of contracts, then it is just the sum of its counterparties. It follows that when a firm monopolizes a particular market and exploits its power to impose unfavorable terms on a counterparty, the firm necessarily exploits one counterparty for the benefit of another, because...

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,...

The reason for which the Supreme Court's embrace of rules of reason—case-by-case analysis of suspect conduct for harm to consumers—has greatly reduced antitrust enforcement over the past forty years is not that rules of reason are biased, but rather that rules of reason are too expensive for...