In case you haven’t already, I recommend taking a gander at today’s New York Time Book Review.  In it, there is a review of Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, by Nobel-winning economist, Joe Stiglitz.  It’s an abomination (I’m sure the book is an abomination, too, but I’m referring to the book review). 

If you know anything about Klein you know that she is an ideological zealot, impervious to facts and reason (although I’m sure some would say the same of me.  Except in her case, it’s actually true).  I’m sure she’s well-meaning and all that, but her book No Logo (yes, I have read it), and now this book, as well (judging only by the reviews–I won’t make the mistake of reading more than one Naomi Klein book), reflect an ignorance of economics, markets and politics that can be born only of utter disdain.  I won’t belabor the point. 

But what’s truly embarrassing is that an economist of Joe Stiglitz’s stature would write an utterly fawning review of her book!  I didn’t know that Stiglitz had slipped as far as Paul Krugman into the land of the “formerly-great-now-blinded-by ideology-to-all-reason” but I can only conclude now that he has.  There is not a single word of criticism in this review.  Not one.  At one point he does note that “she’s not an economist but a journalist,” and he similarly says that she “is not an academic and cannot be judged as one.”  But one gets the powerful sense that these are actually compliments!  Rather than follow these statements by noting one or two errors of, say, oversimplification, omission or confusion (of the sort inexcusable, I guess, by an academic or an economist), he follows them with praise for her tenacity and perspicacity as a journalist and he excuses her oversimplification (apparently there is some in the book (shocking!), but Stiglitz can’t be bothered to hold Klein’s shortcomings up to the light) by claiming that her academic targets–Milton Friedman and his ilk–were guilty of oversimplification, too.  Nya, nya!  I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever bad you say bounces off me and sticks to . . . economists I disagree with!  It’s very illuminating (but not at all in the way one might want to be illuminated by a book review.  But then I guess most reviews are more about the reviewer than the subject, right?).

And, of course, there is the obligatory, barely disguised self-promotion (remember that part about reviews really being about the reviewer).  Just read this paragraph:

Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification, basing their belief in the perfection of market economies on models that assumed perfect information, perfect competition, perfect risk markets. Indeed, the case against these policies is even stronger than the one Klein makes. They were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.

Now which academic economists were doing all this explaining about imperfect information, Joe?  I can’t recall.  Anyway, even the claims he generously makes here on Naomi’s behalf are themselves untenable oversimplifications.  Please, do show me where Friedman believes that ideas can be implemented in a frictionless world?  The claim that Friedman’s models employed simplifying assumptions is true.  But, then, that’s the point of models, even the ones Stiglitz uses.  They are called “models” not “complete, messy representations of reality.”  The implication that Friedman’s assumptions, because they were simplifications, led to results with no relevance is a claim only a journalist or a non-academic would make.   I commend one of Friedman’s most important works–The Methodology of Positive Economics–to Stiglitz’s attention.  He shouldn’t find it too troubling to read–it doesn’t even mention free markets or Ronald Reagan.  Here’s just one important bit:

A theory or its “assumptions” cannot possibly be thoroughly “realistic” in the immediate descriptive sense so often assigned to this term. A completely “realistic” theory of the wheat market would have to include not only the conditions directly underlying the supply and demand for wheat but also the kind of coins or credit instruments used to make exchanges; the personal characteristics of wheat-traders such as the colour of each trader’s hair and eyes, his antecedents and education, the number of members of his family, their characteristics, antecedents, and education, etc.; the kind of soil on which the wheat was grown, its physical and chemical characteristics, the weather prevailing during the growing season; the personal characteristics of the farmers growing the wheat and of the consumers who will ultimately use it; and so on indefinitely. Any attempt to move very far in achieving this kind of “realism” is certain to render a theory utterly useless.

Most important, however, what Friedman knew and what Stiglitz and Klein utterly ignore is that world is a messy place, and implementation of even the best academic ideas must be undertaken with appropriate expectations about the limitations of the institutions doing the implementing.  The only oversimplification here is the one (propounded by Klein, who is an ardent activist, and Stiglitz, who has no excuse) that says that because markets don’t always work perfectly, government solutions are better.  If you read Stiglitz’s review, you’ll see that all of Klein’s examples have one thing in common:  The only alternatives to the actions she abhors are ones entailing more government “solutions” to the endemic problems of the market. 

But the best part is that the refutation of her (and Joe’s) philosophy jumps off every page of her books.  For the common element in each of the actions she decries (Bush taking advantage of misery in Iraq to impose capitalism; the Sri Lankan government displacing poor fishermen in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, etc.) is that the evil being perpetrated, even by her own standards, is being perpetrated by the government!  I know enough about Klein from her other book to know that the irony of this is completely lost on her.  While advocating tirelessly for various forms of government solutions to the evils of capitalism run amok, it is completely lost on her that all of her alleged examples of such run-amokery are perpetrated by . . . governments.  I’m sure she and Joe believe that if only the right governments were in charge, then none of this would happen and the world would be a shiny, happy place.  The naiveté in that is thick.  Again, excusable for an anti-globalization hack like Klein; a bit jarring for a Nobel Prize winner like Stiglitz.

But enough ranting.  There are more important things to do.  I’ll leave you with just this:

I’ve included a longer excerpt from Friedman below the fold.  It contains not only the above bit about the usefulness of simplifying assumptions, but also a nice refutation of the specific claims Stiglitz makes about the irrelevance of models assuming perfect competition.  Frankly this may be the most embarrassing part:  That Stiglitz would make the claims he does in full knowledge that the very person he tries to tar with irrelevance had long ago penned his own clarification (and refutation) of precisely this point.  As I said, it’s an abomination.

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That seems to be the message of presidential candidate/ Senator Barak Obama’s response to the American Antitrust Institute’s questions on antitrust (HT: Antitrust Review). First off, kudos to Obama for stating his position on antitrust in a public forum. I hope the rest of the candidates will do the same. Do go read the whole thing.  The thrust of the message appears to be that an Obama administration would be more active than the Bush administration and that more is better:

Regrettably, the current administration has what may be the weakest record of antitrust enforcement of any administration in the last half century. Between 1996 and 2000, the FTC and DOJ together challenged on average more than 70 mergers per year on the grounds that they would harm consumer welfare. In contrast, between 2001 and 2006, the FTC and DOJ on average only challenged 33. And in seven years, the Bush Justice Department has not brought a single monopolization case.

The consequences of lax enforcement for consumers are clear. Take health care, for example. There have been over 400 health care mergers in the last 10 years. The American Medical Association reports that 95% of insurance markets in the United States are now highly concentrated and the number of insurers has fallen by just under 20% since 2000. These changes were supposed to make the industry more efficient, but instead premiums have skyrocketed, increasing over 87 percent over the past six years. As president, I will direct my administration to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement. It will step up review of merger activity and take effective action to stop or restructure those mergers that are likely to harm consumer welfare, while quickly clearing those that do not.

I am not so sure I’m convinced that level of activity is a good proxy for consumer welfare.  There exist both Type I and Type II enforcement errors.  It may be a bit simplistic to claim victory on behalf of consumers by “doing more.”  Because of the possibility of enforcement errors in both directions I also do not believe that it is “clear” that consumers have been harmed by the lower level of activity in merger enforcement over the past several years.  Note that I am not claiming that the statement is demonstrably false as an empirical matter.  I do not know what the optimal level of merger challenges is, but I do know that it is a function of the error costs imposed by both overactivity and underactivity.

I don’t want to go too far with this as a criticism of the Obama statement specifically.  After all, there is only so much one can do with a two pager on a candidate’s position on all of antitrust enforcement.  Besides, the statement does say that an Obama administration will review the mergers on their merits and only challenge those that are likely to harm consumer welfare.  But I guess all I’m saying is, how does he know then ex ante that his administration will challenge more mergers (much less that more is better)?

Hello everyone!  I’m glad and excited to be a new part of Truth on the Market.  I’d like to thank Josh for inviting me.  Unfortunately, I’ll be very busy through the end of the year so I probably won’t get to post with great frequency, but I look forward to posting more in the future.

I want to note that I’m an economist, not a lawyer.  I worked in litigation consulting for a few years so I have a basic familiarity with antitrust law, but I don’t and won’t pretend to be an expert when it comes to matters of law.  My opinions will come from my economic perspective.

I got a random e-mail the other day from someone at a website called www.globalization.eu.  It occurred after my addition to TOTM, so I wonder if that had something to do with it.  Anyway, the e-mail made me laugh so I figured I’d share it with everyone in my first post.  The e-mail references the following document: http://www.globalisation.eu/publications/unbundlingmicrosoftwindows.pdf.  The author recommends that, to enhance competition, the European Union (EU) require that the Windows operating system not be “bundled” with computers.  In general, bundling is when a company sells two or more goods together for one price.  It can take different forms: pure, mixed, technical.

So, why did I laugh?  First, in my mind, bundling is something that a manufacturer may choose to do with its own products (e.g. bundling shampoo and conditioner, left shoes and right shoes, etc.).  Personally, I wouldn’t say that nails come bundled with the house, tires come bundled with the car, or Intel processors come bundled with the computer.  I would describe them as inputs purchased in a competitive (or reasonably competitive) input market.

Second, the idea that “Microsoft has over 90% market share so we need to allow consumers to choose so we can break into Microsoft’s dominance” is funny to me.  Do you know what else we need to do?????  We need to outlaw the “bundling” of Intel processors in computers so that consumer choice will bust up Intel’s monopoly power!  We have got to outlaw the “bundling” of iPod connectivity and stereo controls with automobiles!  It’s imperative that we outlaw the “bundling” of those darn nails with houses!  I know, I know……there’s not a dominant nail supplier so there’s no need for the latter.  Well, suppose there was, and one nail company had over 90% market share.  Would welfare be improved with a regulation “unbundling” nails from houses, giving consumers a choice?  No!  There’s already competition and choice in the market at the builder level.  On top of that, the end-consumer can still choose to purchase from alternative builders (or alternative auto makers or OEMs in the other examples) or not at all.  Nail companies compete to supply home builders.  Tire companies compete to supply automobile manufacturers.  Intel, AMD, and other processor companies compete to supply processors to OEMs.  If the end-consumers’ preferences are strong enough towards one brand or another, competition and consumer choice between home builders, auto makers, and OEMs will tend to induce them to adjust.  If consumers strongly prefer an alternative, cheaper operating system, do you not think OEMs, competing in an aggressive marketplace, trying to earn profits, will listen?

It’s not scientific, but here’s some anecdotal evidence.  I went to Dell’s website and, within a few clicks, found www.dell.com/open.  They offer Windows-free computers installed instead with Ubuntu Linux or FreeDOS.  The short video in the lower right-hand corner mentions that Dell chose to offer Ubuntu because of the large number of consumer requests on their suggestion box webpage.  So, markets really do tend to adjust to changes in consumer preferences?  Interesting.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that story.  It’s good to be here.  Goodnight, God bless, and Ubuntu…….

Over at TaxProf Blog is an interesting series on “advice to Dean Chemerinsky” from various folks throughout the legal academy.  Here are my three favorites:

• Gordon Smith (Ditch co-curricular offerings, law reviews, moot court, clinics, and writing programs and use the money to improve classroom education)
• Bill Henderson (UC’s brand name and location will get you ranked in the top tier just by showing up to work.  Focus your energies on listening to the labor market … and read his post)

GMU’s Dean Dan Polsby offers a bit of advice any economist could love:

“Think hard about what your comparative advantage is going to be. Build your mission around that. Do not spend a minute or a penny on anything that does not further the mission. And get to be best, best friends with Mr. Bren.”

Along the lines of successful law school specialization strategies, I hope that Caron & Henderson solicit Henry Manne’s advice.

Andrew Young and William Shughart II have posted an interesting paper (forthcoming in Public Choice) entitled “The Consequences of the U.S. DOJ’s Antitrust Activities: A Macroeconomic Perspective.”  Here’s the abstract:

Do the antitrust law enforcement activities of the US Department of Justice act as exogenous “technology shocks”, an essential element of real business cycle theory that hitherto has eluded direct empirical corroboration, or as “markup shocks” limiting market power and promoting economic expansion? We analyze annual time series data from 1947 to 2003 on three measures of federal antitrust intervention: the ratio of the Antitrust Division’s budgetary expenditures to GDP as well as the numbers of civil and criminal antitrust cases instituted. The evidence suggests that changes in the levels of these policy variables act like negative technology shocks to productivity growth. Moreover, the negative effects are found to be transitory; antitrust policy generates no subsequent offsetting (net) increases in productivity.

This paper adds to a substantial literature attempting to quantify the impact of antitrust enforcement.  For a contrary perspective in favor of antitrust enforcement, see Jonathan Baker, The Case for Antitrust Enforcement (17 J. Econ. Persps. 27 (Fall 2003)).

While traveling this weekend, I got a chance to begin Alan Greenspan’s new book, The Age of Turbulence. It’s a pretty fun read, blissfully light on Fedspeak.

(Apparently, Greenspan’s gift in that department was hereditary. Early in the book, he notes that his father had written a book on the New Deal entitled “Recovery Ahead!” The elder Greenspan’s inscription read: “To my son, Alan: May this my initial effort with constant thought of you branch out into an endless chain of similar efforts so that at your maturity you may look back and endeavor to interpret the reasoning behind these logical forecasts and begin a like work of your own. Your dad.”)

In the gazillions of reviews that have appeared so far, one passage from the book has been mentioned time and again. (The WSJ even sent out a news release highlighting it.) Referring to last November’s congressional elections, the oft-quoted passage asserts: “The Republicans in Congress lost their way. They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

Republicans these days have become big spenders and meddlers. I fear this may be an inevitable result of so-called “compassionate conservatism” — which has turned out to be a conservatism that doesn’t like to say no. Our Compassionate Conservative In Chief, for example, went nearly six years without picking up the veto pen. By contrast, Jerry Ford, who laid the groundwork for the regulatory reform movement, vetoed more than sixty bills in less than three years, signaling to Congress that pork and excessive intervention wouldn’t be tolerated.

Apparently, it’s not compassionately conservative to let farmers struggle and eventually have to change what they’re doing (i.e., to reallocate resources to a better use) when low-priced agricultural imports show up. So we got a $250 billion handout in the May 2002 farm bill, and utterly nonsensical ethanol mandates loom on the horizon.

And it’s not compassionately conservative to permit domestic steelworkers to suffer because of imports, so we got steel tariffs to go with our ag handouts. (The tariffs were subsequently lifted when the WTO cried foul.)

And it’s not compassionately conservative to the teachers and administrators at consistently bad public schools if we give parents of students the freedom to spend their federal education dollars on private schools. So we dropped vouchers from No Child Left Behind (but kept all the federal mandates).

I could go on for quite a while here, but you get the point.

The good news is that there’s another form of conservatism out there. While it might look a little gruff on first glance, it’s based on respect for individuals and is, I believe, ultimately compassionate.

Now I don’t fancy myself a conservative. I’m a classical liberal (or, as Stephen Bainbridge might say, a “small l libertarian“). But if I were to embrace conservatism, this is the type I’d choose. Greenspan paints a nice picture of it in describing his old boss, Ronald Reagan:

What attracted me to Reagan was the clarity of his conservatism. There was another line he often used on the stump: “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.” A man who talks on such terms is clear on what he believes. Very rarely in those days would you find conservatives who didn’t fudge on social issues. But Reagan’s kind of conservatism was to say that tough love is good for the individual and good for society. That proposition starts with a judgment about human nature. If it’s accurate, then it implies much less government support for the downtrodden. Yet mainstream Republicans were conflicted about thinking or talking in such terms, because they seemed contrary to Judeo-Christian values. Not Reagan. Like Milton Friedman and other early libertarians, he never gave the impression he was trying to be on both sides of the issue. It’s not that there wasn’t sympathy for people who, through no fault of their own, find themselves in dire straights; nor would you find any less personal willingness than among liberals personally to assist the downtrodden. But that wasn’t government’s role, according to Reagan. Tough love, in the long run, is love.

Melissa Lafsky at the Freakonomics Blog reports on a study showing no relationship between law school courseload choices and bar passage rates (except in the third quartile of students apparently).  So what to do?  Yet another reason to take antitrust (and I guess other specialized electives if you insist …) rather than enrolling in bar subject courses in the hopes that it will impact bar passage. 

After receiving the page proofs last week, I’m posting “Behavioral Law and Economics, Paternalism, and Consumer Contracts: An Empirical Perspective” to SSRN. I wrote this paper for last year’s NYU Journal of Law & Liberty Symposium on Behavioral Economics’ Challenge to the Classical Liberal Program. The basic idea of the paper is an evaluation of the empirical evidence concerning behavioral and neoclassical theoretical predictions in a few settings where behavioral anomalies are frequently argued to justify paternalistic measures: credit cards, standard form contracts, and shelf space contracts. Here’s the abstract:

Modern legal scholars frequently and increasingly base their analyses on the assumption, grounded largely in the extensive experimental literature, that individuals are subject to a number of systematic behavioral biases. Within the legal literature, behavioral economic analysis has been relied upon to generate a significant number of proposals for paternalistic regulation. These proposals are frequently accompanied by claims that neoclassical economics is insufficiently flexible to deal with these empirical observations, and that behavioral law and economics is as a superior guide for policy analysis. These claims must ultimately be resolved empirically and turn on whether incorporating insights from behavioral economics improves our ability to explain the law, understand the behavior of economic agents, or predict the consequences of legal change. This paper focuses on the shared interest of both neoclassical and behavioral economists in empiricism and explanatory power. It asks whether behavioral economic analysis of law has increased our knowledge in an area of “consumer contracts.” Specifically, the paper surveys the available empirical evidence to assess claims from the behavioral law and economics literature involving exploitation of consumer biases with credit cards, standard form contracts, and shelf space contracts. I find that the empirical studies of firm and consumer behavior in these examples do not support the claims that behavioral law and economics generates greater predictive power than conventional price theory.

ProfessorBainbridge.com is up and running as a “hub” for Prof. B’s three blogs on politics, law and economics, and wine and food.  The new site looks pretty sharp too!  Go check it out.

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes responds to the USDOJ Antitrust AG’s criticism of the recent Microsoft decision:

“It is totally unacceptable that a representative of the U.S. administration criticized an independent court of law outside its jurisdiction … The European Commission does not pass judgment on rulings by U.S. courts, and we expect the same degree of respect.”

While it is relatively novel so far as I know, I can’t say I’m too bothered by the DOJ commenting on a ruling of an EU court outside its jurisdiction. The missions of both U.S. antitrust agencies have traditionally included some level of advocacy. The implications of foreign antitrust enforcement may certainly be felt by American consumers, and this is especially the case where the foreign standard is significantly more restrictive than the domestic one. There is no doubt that antitrust counsel to U.S. firms operating in Europe will be forced to reckon with this decision. Open dialogue about the merits of these competing standards, including U.S. standards of course, seems like a good idea to me.

UPDATE: Danny Sokol also fears that the Microsoft judgment will strain U.S.-E.U. relations.   Hanno Kaiser reacts more favorably to the Microsoft decision, describing it as “a tributary of the US case” that “completes or at least complements the original DOJ case against Microsoft.”

Within the last few days, the nation’s two most prominent newspapers have reported an interesting trend: businesses are seeking more government regulation. On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article entitled In Turnaround, Industries Seek U.S. Regulation. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal featured Food Makers Get Appetite for Regulation.

Some might argue that this is a bit ironic. But it’s not. Like rain on your wedding day or a black fly in your Chardonnay, businesses’ clamoring for regulation is not ironic at all. Yet it is, like those occurrences, an awfully unfortunate situation.

An event is ironic, of course, only if there is something about the circumstances in which the event occurs that makes the event particularly unlikely or peculiar. To quote the great Mo Rocca (dissecting Ms. Morissette’s little ditty on VH1’s “I Love the 90s”):

Irony is the disparity between what you expect will happen and what does happen. So raining on your wedding day isn’t ironic; it’s just crappy. It would have been ironic if she had lived in a place like Seattle and traveled to the desert of Mexico for a wedding, and it ended up raining there, but not in Seattle.

Businesses’ clamoring to be regulated, then, cannot be ironic, for it is to be expected. Indeed, both the NYT and WSJ articles pointed to at least four reasons we’d expect businesses to pursue governmental regulation.

First, businesses want to avoid a multiplicity of rules. As a tomato grower states in the WSJ article, “We don’t want 50 different standards, but that’s what’s happening right now.” Federal regulation preempting other rules could simplify compliance for businesses.

Second, businesses want to avoid products liability suits. If it’s cheaper to comply with regulations than to defend, settle, and pay claims on lawsuits, businesses are better off procuring regulations that offer liability protection in exchange for compliance.

Third, businesses can procure regulations in order to achieve advantages over their competitors. In the last few years, American consumers have had access to an unprecedented number of low-priced, high-quality foreign goods. By convincing the government to mandate the production processes they currently use (or could easily adopt), incumbent domestic businesses can both erect barriers to entry and raise the costs of those rivals that do manage to enter the market.

Finally, businesses might seek regulation in order to boost consumer confidence in the products they sell. This is the theme emphasized by the president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, who told the WSJ, “We need to have consumer confidence in the food products.”

These four “stories,” each related in both the NYT and WSJ articles, show that demanding to be regulated — like rain on your wedding day — isn’t at all ironic. But — like rain on your wedding day — it’s still unfortunate. Why do I say that? Because only the third story above — an unfortunate, anti-consumer story — can explain this current clamoring for regulation by potential regulatees.

The first story (“We’re doing this to avoid a multiplicity of rules”) isn’t convincing because the standards at issue aren’t being imposed by states and thus wouldn’t be preempted by federal regulation. As the WSJ noted, the conflicting standards have been set by private actors — “[B]uyers from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to McDonald’s Corp. and Walt Disney Co. are requiring different safety standards and independent inspections.” Federal regulation wouldn’t change this, unless the regulatees could convince buyers to drop their different standards in favor of the uniform federal one. But couldn’t regulatees just as easily convince buyers to adopt a common, privately-crafted standard? It seems a multiplicity of standards could be avoided without imposing mandatory, government-crafted rules.

Voluntary standards could also be used to boost consumer confidence (story #4) and reduce products liability suits (story #2). Private certification agencies do a terrific job of guaranteeing quality and sustaining consumer confidence. The entire kosher food industry, for example, thrives without any governmental regulation of kosher status. And if reduction of tort liability is the real concern of businesses seeking regulation, they could ask legislators and regulators to promulgate consumer-protective, non-mandatory standards, compliance with which would immunize them from tort liability.

But the businesses begging to be regulated aren’t taking that tack. Instead, they’re seeking mandatory government regulations. Such mandates, which wouldn’t avoid a multiplicity of standards and wouldn’t be necessary for either consumer confidence or tort liability protection, would be both necessary and sufficient for another end: raising rivals’ costs. Thus, story #3 is most plausible.

And that should worry us, for when profit-maximizing businesses can enhance their market power (and thus their profit margins) by harnessing the power of the state to reduce competition, consumers lose. As Mo Rocca might say, organized industry’s attempt to do so “isn’t ironic; it’s just crappy.”

Have any of you actually watched the video of the University of Florida student, Andrew Meyer, who was tasered (shocked with a stun gun that emits a “debilitating electrical charge“) by UF Police at a discussion with Senator John Kerry?  The student was asking a series of questions of Senator Kerry, and apparently the student did not want to give up his line of questioning and sit down when his time was up.  The student appears to be loud and obnoxious, but I cannot hear him saying or doing anything dangerous or threatening.

The UF police drag the student away from the microphone, to the back of the auditorium, and they take the student down to the ground.  It appears from the video that multiple UF police officers are on top of him.  The student is on the ground, begging the police not to taser him, … but they do.  His screaming as he is being tasered and after being tasered is astounding.

The link to the video is half-way down the linked page. 

Watch the video.  Pay attention to the part at the bitter end, where the student is on the ground, with multiple police officers on top of him.  He is screaming, “don’t taser me,” and it sounds like he is saying “I’ll leave” (as in, “I’ll leave the conference - I’ll leave the room”).  And then the police taser him.

I am without words.

The reaction to the CFI’s Microsoft decision (press release here) thus far has been largely negative.  Here’s a sample:

1. Luke Froeb: “Disappointingly, the Court failed to articulate a principle that would tell firms when they are competing on the merits and when they are going to violate the increasingly murky European antitrust rules about dominant firm behavior.”
2. Tom Barnett: “We are, however, concerned that the standard applied to unilateral conduct by the CFI, rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition.”
3. The WSJ Editorial Page: “this could get out of hand faster than the click of a mouse. Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith, points out that Apple’s iPod dominates the MP3 player market, in which Microsoft’s Zune is the underdog, and that Google’s search engine has whipped Microsoft’s MSN and all other comers. Not to mention the near-monopoly in some mainframe-computer markets held by IBM, which joined Sun Microsystems in pushing Brussels to take on Microsoft in 1998. Mr. Smith seems to be implying that two can play at this game of making “strategic complaints.”

A few thoughts of my own are below the fold.

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TOTM is pleased to announce another addition to our permanent roster.  Paul Gift, Asssistant Professor of Economics at the Graziadio Business School at Pepperdine University.  Paul has a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA and spent several years in the litigation consulting business with LECG before moving into academia full-time at Pepperdine in 2006.  Paul specializes an antitrust economics and econometrics, but also has significant experience in financial fraud cases and damages estimation.  Welcome Paul!