Got L&E Scholarship? Consider Submitting to the Supreme Court Economic Review
A colleague sent along the 2011 Washington & Lee law journal rankings. As co-editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review (along with Todd Zywicki and Ilya Somin) I was very pleased to notice how well the SCER is faring by these measures. While these rankings should always be taken with a grain of salt or ... Got L&E Scholarship? Consider Submitting to the Supreme Court Economic Review
Amit Singhal on the Past, Present, and Future of Search
Pretty interesting interview with Google’s Senior VP Amit Singhal on where search technology is headed. In the article, Singhal describes the shift from a content-based, keyword index to incorporating links and other signals to improve query results. The most interesting part of the interview is about what is next. Google now wants to transform words that ... Amit Singhal on the Past, Present, and Future of Search
Lessons in Regulatory Barriers to Entry: San Francisco Ice Cream Shop Edition
A great video recounting the trials and tribulations of an entrepreneur and her attempts to open an ice cream shop in San Francisco (HT: Scott James at the NY Times and Craig Newmark). From the NY Times story: Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city’s morass ... Lessons in Regulatory Barriers to Entry: San Francisco Ice Cream Shop Edition
Free to Err? An Exchange on Behavioral Law and Economics at the Liberty Forum
Douglas Ginsburg and I have posted “Free to Err: Behavioral Law and Economics and its Implications for Liberty” on the new and very good Liberty Forum. Our contribution is based upon a more comprehensive analysis of the implications of behavioral law and economics for both economic welfare and liberty forthcoming in the Northwestern Law Review. ... Free to Err? An Exchange on Behavioral Law and Economics at the Liberty Forum
Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards 2012
The Institute for Competition Law and GW Law have put together the Antitrust Writing Awards. You can vote on academic or business articles here. I’m very pleased to report that one of my articles — Does Antitrust Enforcement in High-Tech Markets Benefit Consumers? Stock Price Evidence from FTC v. Intel (Review of Industrial Organization) — ... Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards 2012
Randomizing Regulation
An interesting post on the University of Pennsylvania Reg Blog from Michael Abramowicz, Ian Ayres, and Yair Listokin (AAY) on “Randomizing Regulation,” based upon their piece in the U Penn L. Rev. If legislators disagree about the efficacy of a proposed policy, why not resolve the disagreement with a bet? One approach would be to impose ... Randomizing Regulation
Reference Bloat in Management Journals Meets its Match
Peter Klein offers up some thoughts on “reference bloat” in academic journals: Nature News (via Bronwyn Hall): One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published today in ... Reference Bloat in Management Journals Meets its Match
Do Expert Agencies Outperform Generalist Judges? Some Preliminary Evidence from the Federal Trade Commission
I’ve posted a new project in progress (co-authored with Angela Diveley) to SSRN. In “Do Expert Agencies Outperform Generalist Judges?”, we attempt to examine the relative performance FTC Commissioners and generalist Article III federal court judges in antitrust cases and find some evidence undermining the oft-invoked assumption that Commission expertise leads to superior performance in ... Do Expert Agencies Outperform Generalist Judges? Some Preliminary Evidence from the Federal Trade Commission
Further Empirical Evidence on Forum Shopping in Philadelphia Civil Courts
Late last year, with support from the International Center for Law and Economics, I published a paper that empirically analyzed the Philadelphia civil court system. That study focused upon the Philadelphia Complex Litigation Center (PCLC) which handles large mass tort programs including asbestos cases, hormone therapy replacement cases, various prescription drug-related injuries, and other mass ... Further Empirical Evidence on Forum Shopping in Philadelphia Civil Courts
Congratulations to Bill Baer
President Obama has, as rumored, appointed Bill Baer (Arnold & Porter) to head the Antitrust Division. Reuters reports: Baer, who is the chair of Arnold and Porter’s Antitrust Practice Group, also previously headed the Federal Trade Commission’s competition division when it stopped a merger between Staples and Office Depot in 1997. He will replace Sharis ... Congratulations to Bill Baer
Wright v. Rule at Columbia Law on Google and Antitrust
Charles (“Rick”) Rule, who represents Microsoft and is the head of the antitrust practice at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, and I had an opportunity to debate the various antitrust issues involving Google and its search engine on last week. I didn’t have much of a chance to report here on the blog over the ... Wright v. Rule at Columbia Law on Google and Antitrust
Competition for the Field on the Internet
Keith Woolcock (Time Business) offers an interesting perspective on what economists would describe as “competition for the field” between Apple, Facebook, Google, and Facebook. It gives a good sense of the many dimensions of competition upon which these firms compete. The upcoming IPO of Facebook, the flak surrounding Twitter’s decision to censor some tweets, and Google’s weaker-than-expected 4th-quarter ... Competition for the Field on the Internet
