Session 1

Contemporary Problems in Anti-Monopoly and Regulated Industries I:

Framing the Problem

Required Readings

I. Monopoly Power During the COVID-19 Crisis

• Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff & Jessica Silver-Greenberg, The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed., N.Y. Times (Mar. 29, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-ventilator-shortage.html

• Claire Kelloway, Why Are Farmers Destroying Food While Grocery Stores Are Empty?, Wash. Monthly (Apr. 28, 2020), https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/28/why-are-farmers-destroying-food-while- grocery-stores-are-empty

• Amy Kapczynski, How to Vaccinate the World, Part 1, LPE Blog (Apr. 30, 2021), https://lpeproject.org/blog/how-to-vaccinate-the-world-part-1/

• Reed Abelson, Big Hospital Chains Get Covid Aid, and Buy Up Competitors, N.Y. Times, (May 21, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/health/covid-bailout-hospital-merger.html

• Emily Flitter & Stacy Cowley, Banks Gave Richest Clients ‘Concierge Treatment’ for Pandemic Aid, N.Y. Times (Apr. 22, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/business/sba-loans-ppp-coronavirus.html

II. A Monopoly Power Overview

• Bryce Covert, The Visible Hand, The Nation, Nov. 30, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/david-dayen-monopolized-review  

• Monopoly by the Numbers, Open Markets Institute, https://openmarketsinstitute.org/explainer/monopoly-by-the-numbers (visited May 27, 2020)

• America’s Concentration Crisis: An Open Markets Institute Report, Open Markets Institute, https://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org (June 2019)

• Patrick Foulis, Competition: Trust-Busting in the Twenty-First Century, The Economist (Nov. 15, 2018), https://www.economist.com/special- report/2018/11/15/across-the-west-powerful-firms-are-becoming-even-more-powerful

       Excerpts: “Across the West, powerful firms are becoming even more powerful,” https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/11/15/across-the-west-powerful-firms-are-becoming-even-more-powerful; “Dynamism has declined across Western economies,” https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/11/15/dynamism-has-declined-across-western-economies. 

III. Introduction to Core Anti-Monopoly Themes

• Eleven Things They Don’t Tell You About Law & Economics: An Informal Introduction to Political Economy and Law, 37 Law & Inequality 97 (2019), https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1607&context=lawineq

         Excerpt: Pages 121-25 (section authored by Jamee Moudud)

• Lina M. Khan, The Ideological Roots of America’s Market Power Problem, 127 Yale L.J. F. 960 (2018)

         Excerpt: Pages 960-976

• Sandeep Vaheesan, Privileging Consolidation and Proscribing Cooperation: The Perversity of Contemporary Antitrust Law, 1 Journal of Law & Political Economy 28 (2020), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cj0z1tq

         Excerpt: Pages 29-38

Recorded Lectures

Optional Readings

Optional: LPE and the Anti-Monopoly Problem

• Open Markets Institute et al., Petition for Rulemaking to Prohibit Exclusionary Contracts, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e449c8c3ef68d752f3e70dc/t/5f9acecaa72176270b73b55a/1603981004182/Petition+for+Rulemaking+to+Prohibit+Exclusionary+Contracts.pdf

Excerpt: Section IV 

• Sandeep Vaheesan, Can We Trust Monopolies to Play Fair?, Public Seminar, October 19, 2020, http://publicseminar.org.dream.website/essays/can-we-trust-monopolies-to-play-fair

• Sanjukta Paul, On Socializing the Constitution of Economic Coordination, LPE Blog, June 29, 2020, https://lpeproject.org/blog/on-socializing-the-constitution-of-economic-coordination

• Lina M. Khan, The End of Antitrust History Revisited, 133 Harv. L. Rev. 1655 (2020), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3552132

• Lina M. Khan, Note, Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, 126 Yale L.J. 710 (2017), https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf

          Excerpt: Pages 746–55

• K. Sabeel Rahman, The New Octopus, Logic (Apr. 1, 2018), https://logicmag.io/scale/the-new-octopus

• Frank Pasquale, Two Narratives of Platform Capitalism, 35 Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. 309 (2016), https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/fac_pubs/1582

• Ryan Calo & Alex Rosenblat, The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power, 117 Colum. L. Rev. 1623 (2017), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/47

• Tim Wu, The Utah Statement: Reviving Antimonopoly Traditions for the Era of Big Tech, OneZero (Nov. 18, 2019), https://onezero.medium.com/the-utah-statement- reviving-antimonopoly-traditions-for-the-era-of-big-tech-e6be198012d7

• Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Anti-Trust in the New Guilded Age (2018)

          Excerpt: Read the Introduction

• The Roosevelt Institute, Untamed: How to Check Corporate, Financial, and Monopoly Power (2016), https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/06/Untamed-Final-5.10.17.pdf

          Excerpt: Pages 7–9, 13–14, 18

Optional: Recent Empirical Findings

• Bruce A. Blonigen & Justin R. Pierce, Evidence for the Effects of Mergers on Market Power and Efficiency (2016), https://www.nber.org/papers/w22750 

          Excerpt: Pages 1-6, 25

• Nathan Wilmers, Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978 to 2014, 83 American Sociological Review 213 (2018), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122418762441

          Excerpt: Pages 232-33

• Brian Callaci, Puppet Entrepreneurship (2021), https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DataSociety-PuppetEntrepreneurship-Final.pdf

          Excerpt: Pages 2-4, 27-28

• José Azar, Ioana Marinescu & Marshall Steinbaum, Labor Market Concentration, SSRN (2018), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3088767

          Excerpt: Pages 1–4

• U.S. Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law of the Committee on the Judiciary, Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets (Oct. 2020), https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_digital_markets.pdf

          Excerpt: Pages 10-19 [Findings]

• Matt Day & Spencer Soper, Amazon Has Turned a Middle-Class Warehouse Career Into a McJob, Bloomberg (Dec. 17, 2020), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-amzn-job-pay-rate-leaves-some-warehouse-employees-homeless

• Einer Elhauge, Horizontal Shareholding, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 1267 (2016), https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1267-1317-Online.pdf

          Excerpt: Pages 1267–1269