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