I think conferences like this are an effective way to attract talented economists to work on interesting antitrust problems. I can envision a similar event from the Bureau of Competition or policy shops featuring academic research from law and economics scholars. Here’s the conference announcement:
The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics will host a two day conference to bring together scholars working in industrial organization, information economics, game theory, quantitative marketing, consumer behavior, and other areas related to the FTC’s antitrust and consumer policy missions. Examples of potentially relevant topics include online advertising, information disclosure, horizontal and vertical mergers, bundling, loyalty and other discounts, dynamic oligopoly, intellectual property, and behavioral and experimental economics.
The scientific committee for the conference is:
- Susan Athey (Harvard)
- Patrick Bajari (Minnesota)
- John List (Chicago)
- Carl Shapiro (Berkeley)
- Scott Stern (Northwestern-Kellogg)
The conference will be held at the Federal Trade Commission New Jersey Avenue Conference Center, 601 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001.
PRE-REGISTRATION
Pre-registration for this conference is not necessary, but is encouraged so that we may better plan for the event.
To pre-register, please email your name and affiliation to BE-IOC@ftc.gov.
NOTE: When you pre-register, we will collect your name, affiliation, and your email address. This information will be used to estimate how many people will attend. We may use your email address to contact you with information about the conference.
Additional information will be posted as it becomes available.
SPEAKERS SLATED TO APPEAR, AS OF 9/30/2008
- Alan Sorensen “The Welfare Effects of Ticket Resale”
- Andrew Sweeting “Equilibrium Price Dynamics in Perishable Goods Markets: The Case of Secondary Markets for Major League Baseball Tickets”
- Steve Puller “Testing Theories of Price Dispersion and Scarcity Pricing in the Airline Industry”
- Stephen Meier “Charging Myopically Ahead: Evidence on Present-Biased Preferences and Credit Card Borrowing”
- James Hilger “Expert Opinion and the Demand for Experience Goods: An Experimental Approach in the Retail”
- Cary Deck “Price Discrimination with Sequential Purchasing: Theory and Experiments”
- Dean Karlan “Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Savings Account for Smoking Cessation”
- Mike Waldman “Why Tie a Product Consumers Do Not Use? Explanations – efficiency, price discrimination, and exclusion”
- Claudio Lucarelli “Sleeping with the Enemy: Inter-firm Product Combinations”
- Christian Rojas “The Role of Information and Monitoring on Collusion”
- Matt Weinberg “An Evaluation of Merger Simulations”
- Jeremy Fox “Improving the Numerical Performance of BLP Static and Dynamic Discrete Choice Random Coefficients Demand Estimation”
- Katja Seim “Beyond Plain Vanilla: Modeling Joint Product Assortment and Pricing Decisions”
- David Reiley “Retail Advertising Works!…on Yahoo!”
- Anindya Ghose “Modeling and Estimating the Relationship Between Organic and Paid Search Advertising”
- Gunter Hitsch “Tipping and Concentration in Markets with Indirect Network Effects”