Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal brought the story, “Bud Crowded Out by Craft Beer Craze.” While Bud Light is currently the highest selling beer in the United States, the flagship brand Budweiser is fading. The international beverage giant is scrambling to win over younger drinkers to boost Budweiser sales, so the familiar Clydesdale horses are out …
Lynne Kiesling Remember the first time you bought a mobile phone (which in my case was 1995). You may have been happy with your land line phone, but this new mobile phone thing looks like it would be really handy in an emergency, so you-in-1995 said sure, I’ll get a cell phone, but not really …
Lynne Kiesling For the past year and a half the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating the potential anti-competitive effects of Google’s search-based business model. The European Union has also been pursuing antitrust complaints against Google. The main accusation is Google search bias — Google’s algorithm prioritizes links both to paid advertisers (which are shaded …
Michael Giberson George Priest, professor of economics and law at Yale, clearly outlines the main errors of the Obama administration’s decision to oppose the AT&T/T-Mobile merger and cites relevant evidence backing the view: It is very difficult at an abstract level to know what the effects of a merger or acquisition will be on competition …
Another Good Response to the Obama Administration’s Mistaken Antitrust Policy Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As an addendum to my earlier post on the DOJ’s challenge of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, Peter Suderman at Reason has an informative post (with good links@) making essentially the same point as mine. The more the merrier!
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday’s announcement that the US DOJ would challenge the merger of AT&T’s wireless business with T-Mobile’s was surprising, and their approach to the merger seems to be more conventional and rooted in old HHI-market share and price effect metrics. Their analysis suggests that due to the substantial overlap in the existing separate AT&T …
Quality, Broadband, and Spectrum: What the Doj’s At&t/T-Mobile Lawsuit Misses Read More »
Lynne Kiesling This article in the Wall Street Journal last week got less attention than I expected (perhaps because of budget, Libya, etc. news). It’s a very good analysis of bureaucrat v. bureaucrat competition between the DOJ and the FTC on which agency will take the lead in prosecuting antitrust cases: Both agencies are charged …
Michael Giberson The Martha’s Vineyard Times: A panel of judges sitting in the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that gasoline prices on Martha’s Vineyard have not been illegally inflated by a conspiracy among retailers, according to a report by “The Docket,” the news blog of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. …
Michael Giberson “By the Justice Department’s calculations, Keyspan’s anti-competitive actions resulted in it receiving almost $49 million. The settlement submitted by the Justice Department would let Keyspan keep $37 million from its anti-competitive actions. Netting $37 million for anti-competitive conduct is not a penalty, it is not a deterrent, it is a reward.” “Anything short …
Another Comment on United States V. Keyspan Corporation Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I hope all of you economists out there are following the current brouhaha between Amazon and the publisher Macmillan, because the number of fascinating economics issues is stunning. In brief, Macmillan is one of the publishers working with Apple on the iPad and Apple’s ebook store. At the same time (I remain agnostic …
Publishers and Ebooks: Innovation, Drm, and Resale Price Maintenance Read More »
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