Scholarly commentary on law, economics, and more
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Earlier this summer, my family took a vacation to Ocean City, Maryland, where the boardwalk offered ice cream, souvenirs, and an unexpected lesson in payment economics. Every retailer we visited added a surcharge of at least 3% for credit-card payments, yet not one posted a sign. I discovered the charges only later, while checking my ... A Fee Too Far: Merchants, Surcharges, and the War on Plastic…
Four patents can carry a lot of antitrust baggage—especially when they come tucked inside a portfolio of more than 500. In CareFirst of Maryland v. Johnson & Johnson, health insurer CareFirst alleges that Johnson & Johnson unlawfully acquired and later asserted four patents to delay competition from biosimilars, highly similar alternatives to biologic drugs, for ... Four Patents and a Time…
The We Are What We Read series is, in part, about what defines the field of law & economics. The field’s natural home lies in applications that are, well, economic. Hence its longstanding—and now standard—role in contracts, corporations, antitrust, torts, and other areas. For this selection, I wanted to show how law & economics can ... ‘Deliberation as Self-Discovery and Institutions for Political…
Few antitrust investigations find their theory of harm laid out in the target’s sales brochure. Brazil’s investigation of Aprix, a startup that sells pricing software to gas stations, nearly managed the feat. One of the company’s promotional brochures introduced prospective clients to the prisoner’s dilemma, the classic game-theory example in which individually rational choices can ... Premium,…
The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Build America Agenda rests on a simple premise: Stop making it so hard to build. Federal and state policymakers have spent years reducing permitting delays, resolving pole-attachment disputes, and easing access to public rights-of-way—the public corridors used for infrastructure such as roads, utility poles, and fiber lines. These obstacles slow ...…
Antitrust law’s usual instruction to competitors who agree on price is admirably brief: Don’t. Labor law makes a deliberate exception for employees who bargain collectively. Advocates now want that exception to cover at least some independent contractors, including rideshare drivers, truck owner-operators, consultants, and other small-business owners. The proposal may sound like a tidy way ...…
Advertising’s oldest rule is simple: Know your audience. In California, following it may get an online platform sued. Show retirement-home ads to seniors and student discounts to college students, and sensible targeting can suddenly look like unlawful discrimination. That question is now before California’s Sixth Appellate District. The dispute arises from a trial court ruling in ... Google, the…
The whole country ostensibly wants America to win the artificial intelligence (AI) race. A striking number, however, would prefer someone else’s town to host the data centers, power plants, transmission lines, and cooling systems required to run it. Adam Smith knew the type. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” he warned against the “man of ... The Data Center Chessboard Has No Pause Button The…
Nigeria has looked south and seen a $40 million payday for the press. The trouble is that it misread both the price tag and the fine print—and its attempt to collect may leave Nigerian publishers with fewer readers and no comparable payday. On July 6, Nigeria’s Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) announced investigations ... Copy, Paste, Compensate: Nigeria’s Misguided…
The AI industry has entered its manifesto era. Executives, researchers, and employees are issuing rival plans to keep advanced models safe. The fine print contains a less advertised question: Would those plans protect the public—or protect today’s leaders from the open models gaining on them? That competition question starts with open-source AI models. These models ... Open Weights, Closed Ranks:…
Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the political upheavals that followed, concerns have grown that many Western democracies face authoritarian pressure and are becoming less democratic. This shift has renewed interest in one of political science’s most influential frameworks for understanding democratic and nondemocratic rule: Selectorate Theory, developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith,…
Australia’s latest plan to make digital platforms pay for journalism has an unusual feature. A platform can owe money even if it carries no journalism at all. The government calls this an “incentive.” On Aug. 3, the Australian government finalized legislation establishing the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI). The government first proposed the NBI in December ... Much Ado About No News: Australia’s…
Note: Our editor is on vacation. The image for this post and any errors in the body are solely the fault of the author. At its August 6 open meeting, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is scheduled to vote on a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) titled “Unleashing Unlicensed Spectrum for Direct-to-Device.” This proceeding will ... The FCC Is Right To Keep Every Band on the Table for…
