Section I: Foundations

ABSTRACT

Section I explains the foundational economic concepts and legal principles that apply to the digital economy.

Overview of Network Effects & Platforms in Digital Markets

In this chapter, we address a number of foundational questions. What exactly are platforms? How do platforms relate to the various types of network effects? Importantly, do we need different tools to assess potential anticompetitive...

↓ Download Chapter

Error Costs in Digital Markets

Legal decision-making and enforcement under uncertainty are always difficult and always potentially costly. The risk of error is always present given the limits of knowledge, but it is magnified by the precedential nature of judicial...

↓ Download Chapter

Antitrust in Retrograde: The Consumer Welfare Standard, Socio-Political Goals, and the Future of Enforcement

Part I of this Chapter examines the history of antitrust law to contextualize the current debate regarding the consumer welfare standard. It addresses the numerous legislative history arguments and examines the courts’ experience...

↓ Download Chapter

Network Effects in Action

This Chapter begins by examining and exploring the theoretical and empirical limits of the possible bases of network effects, paying particular attention to the most commonly cited framework known as Metcalfe’s Law. It continues by...

↓ Download Chapter

Technology Economics: Innovation, Licensing, and Antitrust

Public policy toward innovation faces a trade-off: Increasing the compensation of successful inventors increases dynamic efficiency by spurring technological progress, but it decreases static efficiency by enlarging a wedge between price...

↓ Download Chapter

The Role of Big Data in Antitrust

In this chapter, we discuss the role of big data in antitrust with a particular focus on the rise and success of large digital platforms—as the importance of data has caught the attention of various reports on the digital...

↓ Download Chapter

Vertical Mergers and Integration in Digital Markets

In this chapter, we address three issues relating to vertical mergers and antitrust: (1) incorporating the elimination of double marginalization into the analysis of the likelihood of a unilateral price effect rather than treating it as a...

↓ Download Chapter

The Economics of Vertical Restraints in Digital Markets

Vertical restraints are contractual arrangements between firms at different levels in a supply chain (e.g., manufacturer and retailer, manufacturer and distributor, distributor and retailer) that are more complex than simple per-unit...

↓ Download Chapter

Self-Preferencing

From the standpoint of competition policy, it might seem desirable to modularize competition to the greatest extent possible so that the best and cheapest products prevail at every stage of a production process and in every component of...

↓ Download Chapter

Toward the Peaceful Coexistence of Patent and Antitrust Law

This chapter explores the interrelationship between these two basic provisions, both as a matter of general theory and through their development in case law over the past 130 years—which spans multiple eras of technological innovation....

↓ Download Chapter