Six CRA consultants and academic affiliates have been nominated for the 2024 Antitrust Writing Awards. The awards aim to promote antitrust scholarship and competition advocacy by recognizing and awarding the best articles published in antitrust law and the law and economics fields over the past year.
The winners will be announced April 9, 2024 during a ceremony hosted by Concurrences Journal and George Washington University Law School Competition Law Center. For more information on the awards, click here.
You can read and vote for articles until April 5, 2024. To take part in the voting, click on the article links below.
Academic Articles
Nominee – Best Academic Article (Concerted Practices)
An Antitrust Exemption for Workers: And Why Worker Bargaining Power Benefits Consumers, Too
Antitrust Law Journal, Douglas Melamed and Steven Salop, forthcoming
Based on economic analysis that indicates the moderate worker bargaining power when negotiating with employers leads to increases in downstream output and lower prices as well as increases in wages and employment, the authors propose legislation that establishes an antitrust exemption to permit the formation of voluntary worker associations that enable workers to engage in joint negotiation (i.e., collective bargaining) with employer firms that are likely to have “monopsony bargaining power,” that is, either “classical” monopsony power or a dominant degree of bargaining power.
Nominee – Best Academic Article (Procedure)
Antitrust Law Journal, George Hay and Thomas P. Turgeon, October 2023, Volume 85, Issue 2
In this article, the authors focus on recent big tech antitrust cases. Specifically, they provide a timely and rich “real-world” blackboard for pointing out the extraordinarily complex and rich procedural aspects of antitrust law in the United States. While some readers may be generally familiar with many of the observations we will make, it is still a rare opportunity to see all these procedural aspects of U.S. antitrust law so prominently on display in the context of one segment of the economy (often referred to as “big tech”).
To recap recent events, in Part I, we provide a synopsis of the recent big tech antitrust cases against Google and Facebook. In Part II, we discuss how federal and state antitrust enforcers operate. In Part III, we discuss civil procedure concepts in the context of antitrust enforcement actions. In Part IV, we explore the process for joint investigations among agencies and at the state and federal levels. In Part V, we discuss the efficacy of state involvement in nationwide antitrust litigation. Finally, in Part VI, we discuss the utility of having two federal agencies oversee antitrust enforcement. We use the cases against Google and Facebook as mechanisms to discuss the concepts we explore in Parts II through VI.
Business Articles
Nominee – Best Business Article (Digital)
Big Tech Acquisitions and Innovation Incentives
Network Law Review, Raphaël De Coninck and Christoph von Muellern, July 2023, Summer 2023
The article argues that merger policy in the tech sector must be based on solid empirical evidence, and that it should not only consider post-merger effects on innovation, but also its ex-ante impact on pre-merger innovation. While a growing theoretical literature is emerging on this question, more empirical evidence is needed to assess how merger policy affects not only the level, but also the direction of pre-merger innovation incentives.
Nominee – Business Article (General Antitrust)
Greed or Need? Focusing Competition Policy in Inflationary Times
Competition Law Insight, Agostino Bignardi, Verity Egerton-Doyle, Diana Jackson and Nicole Kar, November 2023
Diana Jackson collaborated with three Linklaters’ attorneys on this nominated article. Record levels of inflation worldwide have resulted from a wide range of factors: the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic; the Russia-Ukraine war; disruptions to supply chains; and high levels of employment (amongst others). This inflation, paired with stagnant or declining real wages, has led to increased public and governmental pressure on antitrust agencies to help tackle the global cost-of-living crisis facing consumers.
Competition policy cannot resolve fundamental supply side disruptions, but it can tackle “profit-push” inflation: the concern that, at times of economic disruption, margins may actually increase in some industries. While increases in profit as a result of anti-competitive behaviour can take place at any stage of the economic cycle, the increased prices that result may be easier to justify to customers at times of high general inflation.
Nominee – Business Article (General Economics)
Private Equity and Competition—Comparing U.S. Agency Views to Recent Policy and Empirical Evidence
Antitrust Magazine Online, Ken Schwartz, Michael Singer and Isabel Tecu, April 2023
In this article, the authors summarize recent statements by FTC and DOJ leadership that suggest that private equity investment is harmful to competition and show that these statements conflict with previous agency policy and leadership opinion. It highlights empirical economic evidence suggesting that a blanket negative view of private equity in the competition context is misplaced.
