Archives For antitrust

Elizabeth Warren wants to turn the internet into a literal sewer (service)

Manne & Stapp —  9 March 2019 — 4 Comments

Near the end of her new proposal to break up Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple, Senator Warren asks, “So what would the Internet look like after all these reforms?”

It’s a good question, because, as she herself notes, “Twenty-five years ago, Facebook, Google, and Amazon didn’t exist. Now they are among the most valuable and well-known companies in the world.”

To Warren, our most dynamic and innovative companies constitute a problem that needs solving.

She described the details of that solution in a blog post:

First, [my administration would restore competition to the tech sector] by passing legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.

* * *

For smaller companies…, their platform utilities would be required to meet the same standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users, but would not be required to structurally separate….

* * *
Second, my administration would appoint regulators committed to reversing illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers….
I will appoint regulators who are committed to… unwind[ing] anti-competitive mergers, including:

– Amazon: Whole Foods; Zappos;
– Facebook: WhatsApp; Instagram;
– Google: Waze; Nest; DoubleClick

Elizabeth Warren’s brave new world

Let’s consider for a moment what this brave new world will look like — not the nirvana imagined by regulators and legislators who believe that decimating a company’s business model will deter only the “bad” aspects of the model while preserving the “good,” as if by magic, but the inevitable reality of antitrust populism.  

Utilities? Are you kidding? For an overview of what the future of tech would look like under Warren’s “Platform Utility” policy, take a look at your water, electricity, and sewage service. Have you noticed any improvement (or reduction in cost) in those services over the past 10 or 15 years? How about the roads? Amtrak? Platform businesses operating under a similar regulatory regime would also similarly stagnate. Enforcing platform “neutrality” necessarily requires meddling in the most minute of business decisions, inevitably creating unintended and costly consequences along the way.

Network companies, like all businesses, differentiate themselves by offering unique bundles of services to customers. By definition, this means vertically integrating with some product markets and not others. Why are digital assistants like Siri bundled into mobile operating systems? Why aren’t the vast majority of third-party apps also bundled into the OS? If you want utilities regulators instead of Google or Apple engineers and designers making these decisions on the margin, then Warren’s “Platform Utility” policy is the way to go.

Grocery Stores. To take one specific case cited by Warren, how much innovation was there in the grocery store industry before Amazon bought Whole Foods? Since the acquisition, large grocery retailers, like Walmart and Kroger, have increased their investment in online services to better compete with the e-commerce champion. Many industry analysts expect grocery stores to use computer vision technology and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency of check-out in the near future.

Smartphones. Imagine how forced neutrality would play out in the context of iPhones. If Apple can’t sell its own apps, it also can’t pre-install its own apps. A brand new iPhone with no apps — and even more importantly, no App Store — would be, well, just a phone, out of the box. How would users even access a site or app store from which to download independent apps? Would Apple be allowed to pre-install someone else’s apps? That’s discriminatory, too. Maybe it will be forced to offer a menu of all available apps in all categories (like the famously useless browser ballot screen demanded by the European Commission in its Microsoft antitrust case)? It’s hard to see how that benefits consumers — or even app developers.

Source: Free Software Magazine

Internet Search. Or take search. Calls for “search neutrality” have been bandied about for years. But most proponents of search neutrality fail to recognize that all Google’s search results entail bias in favor of its own offerings. As Geoff Manne and Josh Wright noted in 2011 at the height of the search neutrality debate:

[S]earch engines offer up results in the form not only of typical text results, but also maps, travel information, product pages, books, social media and more. To the extent that alleged bias turns on a search engine favoring its own maps, for example, over another firm’s, the allegation fails to appreciate that text results and maps are variants of the same thing, and efforts to restrain a search engine from offering its own maps is no different than preventing it from offering its own search results.

Nevermind that Google with forced non-discrimination likely means Google offering only the antiquated “ten blue links” search results page it started with in 1998 instead of the far more useful “rich” results it offers today; logically it would also mean Google somehow offering the set of links produced by any and all other search engines’ algorithms, in lieu of its own. If you think Google will continue to invest in and maintain the wealth of services it offers today on the strength of the profits derived from those search results, well, Elizabeth Warren is probably already your favorite politician.

Source: Web Design Museum  

And regulatory oversight of algorithmic content won’t just result in an impoverished digital experience; it will inevitably lead to an authoritarian one, as well:

Any agency granted a mandate to undertake such algorithmic oversight, and override or reconfigure the product of online services, thereby controls the content consumers may access…. This sort of control is deeply problematic… [because it saddles users] with a pervasive set of speech controls promulgated by the government. The history of such state censorship is one which has demonstrated strong harms to both social welfare and rule of law, and should not be emulated.

Digital Assistants. Consider also the veritable cage match among the tech giants to offer “digital assistants” and “smart home” devices with ever-more features at ever-lower prices. Today the allegedly non-existent competition among these companies is played out most visibly in this multi-featured market, comprising advanced devices tightly integrated with artificial intelligence, voice recognition, advanced algorithms, and a host of services. Under Warren’s nondiscrimination principle this market disappears. Each device can offer only a connectivity platform (if such a service is even permitted to be bundled with a physical device…) — and nothing more.

But such a world entails not only the end of an entire, promising avenue of consumer-benefiting innovation, it also entails the end of a promising avenue of consumer-benefiting competition. It beggars belief that anyone thinks consumers would benefit by forcing technology companies into their own silos, ensuring that the most powerful sources of competition for each other are confined to their own fiefdoms by order of law.

Breaking business models

Beyond the product-feature dimension, Sen. Warren’s proposal would be devastating for innovative business models. Why is Amazon Prime Video bundled with free shipping? Because the marginal cost of distribution for video is close to zero and bundling it with Amazon Prime increases the value proposition for customers. Why is almost every Google service free to users? Because Google’s business model is supported by ads, not monthly subscription fees. Each of the tech giants has carefully constructed an ecosystem in which every component reinforces the others. Sen. Warren’s plan would not only break up the companies, it would prohibit their business models — the ones that both created and continue to sustain these products. Such an outcome would manifestly harm consumers.

Both of Warren’s policy “solutions” are misguided and will lead to higher prices and less innovation. Her cause for alarm is built on a multitude of mistaken assumptions, but let’s address just a few (Warren in bold):

  • “Nearly half of all e-commerce goes through Amazon.” Yes, but it has only 5% of total retail in the United States. As my colleague Kristian Stout says, “the Internet is not a market; it’s a distribution channel.”
  • “Amazon has used its immense market power to force smaller competitors like Diapers.com to sell at a discounted rate.” The real story, as the founders of Diapers.com freely admitted, is that they sold diapers as what they hoped would be a loss leader, intending to build out sales of other products once they had a base of loyal customers:

And so we started with selling the loss leader product to basically build a relationship with mom. And once they had the passion for the brand and they were shopping with us on a weekly or a monthly basis that they’d start to fall in love with that brand. We were losing money on every box of diapers that we sold. We weren’t able to buy direct from the manufacturers.

Like all entrepreneurs, Diapers.com’s founders took a calculated risk that didn’t pay off as hoped. Amazon subsequently acquired the company (after it had declined a similar buyout offer from Walmart). (Antitrust laws protect consumers, not inefficient competitors). And no, this was not a case of predatory pricing. After many years of trying to make the business profitable as a subsidiary, Amazon shut it down in 2017.

  • “In the 1990s, Microsoft — the tech giant of its time — was trying to parlay its dominance in computer operating systems into dominance in the new area of web browsing. The federal government sued Microsoft for violating anti-monopoly laws and eventually reached a settlement. The government’s antitrust case against Microsoft helped clear a path for Internet companies like Google and Facebook to emerge.” The government’s settlement with Microsoft is not the reason Google and Facebook were able to emerge. Neither company entered the browser market at launch. Instead, they leapfrogged the browser entirely and created new platforms for the web (only later did Google create Chrome).

    Furthermore, if the Microsoft case is responsible for “clearing a path” for Google is it not also responsible for clearing a path for Google’s alleged depredations? If the answer is that antitrust enforcement should be consistently more aggressive in order to rein in Google, too, when it gets out of line, then how can we be sure that that same more-aggressive enforcement standard wouldn’t have curtailed the extent of the Microsoft ecosystem in which it was profitable for Google to become Google? Warren implicitly assumes that only the enforcement decision in Microsoft was relevant to Google’s rise. But Microsoft doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If Microsoft cleared a path for Google, so did every decision not to intervene, which, all combined, created the legal, business, and economic environment in which Google operates.

Warren characterizes Big Tech as a weight on the American economy. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. These superstar companies are the drivers of productivity growth, all ranking at or near the top for most spending on research and development. And while data may not be the new oil, extracting value from it may require similar levels of capital expenditure. Last year, Big Tech spent as much or more on capex as the world’s largest oil companies:

Source: WSJ

Warren also faults Big Tech for a decline in startups, saying,

The number of tech startups has slumped, there are fewer high-growth young firms typical of the tech industry, and first financing rounds for tech startups have declined 22% since 2012.

But this trend predates the existence of the companies she criticizes, as this chart from Quartz shows:

The exact causes of the decline in business dynamism are still uncertain, but recent research points to a much more mundane explanation: demographics. Labor force growth has been declining, which has led to an increase in average firm age, nudging fewer workers to start their own businesses.

Furthermore, it’s not at all clear whether this is actually a decline in business dynamism, or merely a change in business model. We would expect to see the same pattern, for example, if would-be startup founders were designing their software for acquisition and further development within larger, better-funded enterprises.

Will Rinehart recently looked at the literature to determine whether there is indeed a “kill zone” for startups around Big Tech incumbents. One paper finds that “an increase in fixed costs explains most of the decline in the aggregate entrepreneurship rate.” Another shows an inverse correlation across 50 countries between GDP and entrepreneurship rates. Robert Lucas predicted these trends back in 1978, pointing out that productivity increases would lead to wage increases, pushing marginal entrepreneurs out of startups and into big companies.

It’s notable that many in the venture capital community would rather not have Sen. Warren’s “help”:

Arguably, it is also simply getting harder to innovate. As economists Nick Bloom, Chad Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb argue,

just to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the U.S. must double the amount of research effort searching for new ideas every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas.

If this assessment is correct, it may well be that coming up with productive and profitable innovations is simply becoming more expensive, and thus, at the margin, each dollar of venture capital can fund less of it. Ironically, this also implies that larger firms, which can better afford the additional resources required to sustain exponential growth, are a crucial part of the solution, not the problem.

Warren believes that Big Tech is the cause of our social ills. But Americans have more trust in Amazon, Facebook, and Google than in the political institutions that would break them up. It would be wise for her to reflect on why that might be the case. By punishing our most valuable companies for past successes, Warren would chill competition and decrease returns to innovation.

Finally, in what can only be described as tragic irony, the most prominent political figure who shares Warren’s feelings on Big Tech is President Trump. Confirming the horseshoe theory of politics, far-left populism and far-right populism seem less distinguishable by the day. As our colleague Gus Hurwitz put it, with this proposal Warren is explicitly endorsing the unitary executive theory and implicitly endorsing Trump’s authority to direct his DOJ to “investigate specific cases and reach specific outcomes.” Which cases will he want to have investigated and what outcomes will he be seeking? More good questions that Senator Warren should be asking. The notion that competition, consumer welfare, and growth are likely to increase in such an environment is farcical.

In antitrust, antitrust penalties, exclusionary conduct, google, law and economics, mergers & acquisitions, monopolization, technology, truth on the market, vertical restraints , , , , , , , , , ,
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Doing double damage: The German competition authority’s Facebook decision manages to undermine both antitrust and data protection law

Geoffrey Manne —  8 February 2019

The German Bundeskartellamt’s Facebook decision is unsound from either a competition or privacy policy perspective, and will only make the fraught privacy/antitrust relationship worse.

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In anticompetitive market distortions, antitrust, consumer protection, european commission, exclusionary conduct, international competition, monopolization, privacy, technology , , , , ,
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Boom, bust, and collusion: Does it really matter?

Eric Fruits —  22 January 2019

A recent working paper by Hashmat Khan and Matthew Strathearn attempts to empirically link anticompetitive collusion to the boom and bust cycles of the economy.

The level of collusion is higher during a boom relative to a recession as collusion occurs more frequently when demand is increasing (entering into a collusive arrangement is more profitable and deviating from an existing cartel is less profitable). The model predicts that the number of discovered cartels and hence antitrust filings should be procyclical because the level of collusion is procyclical.

The first sentence—a hypothesis that collusion is more likely during a “boom” than in recession—seems reasonable. At the same time, a case can be made that collusion would be more likely during recession. For example, a reduced risk of entry from competitors would reduce the cost of collusion.

The second sentence, however, seems a stretch. Mainly because it doesn’t recognize the time delay between the collusive activity, the date the collusion is discovered by authorities, and the date the case is filed.

Perhaps, more importantly, it doesn’t acknowledge that many collusive arrangement span months, if not years. That span of time could include times of “boom” and times of recession. Thus, it can be argued that the date of the filing has little (or nothing) to do with the span over which the collusive activity occurred.

I did a very lazy man’s test of my criticisms. I looked at six of the filings cited by Khan and Strathearn for the year 2011, a “boom” year with a high number of horizontal price fixing cases filed.

khanstrathearn

My first suspicion was correct. In these six cases, an average of more than three years passed from the date of the last collusive activity and the date the case was filed. Thus, whether the economy is a boom or bust when the case is filed provides no useful information regarding the state of the economy when the collusion occurred.

Nevertheless, my lazy man’s small sample test provides some interesting—and I hope useful—information regarding Khan and Strathearn’s conclusions.

  1. From July 2001 through September 2009, 24 of the 99 months were in recession. In other words, during this period, there was a 24 percent chance the economy was in recession in any given month.
  2. Five of the six collusive arrangements began when the economy was in recovery. Only one began during a recession. This may seem to support their conclusion that collusive activity is more likely during a recovery. However, even if the arrangements began randomly, there would be a 55 percent chance that that five or more began during a recovery. So, you can’t read too much into the observation that most of the collusive agreements began during a “boom.”
  3. In two of the cases, the collusive activity occurred during a span of time that had no recession. The chances of this happening randomly is less than 1 in 20,000, supporting their conclusion regarding collusive activity and the business cycle.

Khan and Strathearn fall short in linking collusive activity to the business cycle but do a good job of linking antitrust enforcement activities to the business cycle. The information they use from the DOJ website is sufficient to determine when the collusive activity occurred—but it’ll take more vigorous “scrubbing” (their word) of the site to get the relevant data.

The bigger question, however, is the relevance of this research. Naturally, one could argue this line of research indicates that competition authorities should be extra vigilant during a booming economy. Yet, Adam Smith famously noted, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” This suggests that collusive activity—or the temptation to engage in such activity—is always and everywhere present, regardless of the business cycle.

 

In antitrust, truth on the market , ,
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Drifting toward nonsense on EU vs. US competitiveness: The profits puzzle

Eric Fruits —  4 December 2018

A recent NBER working paper by Gutiérrez & Philippon has attracted attention from observers who see oligopoly everywhere and activists who want governments to more actively “manage” competition. The analysis in the paper is fundamentally flawed and should not be relied upon by policymakers, regulators, or anyone else.

As noted in my earlier post, Gutiérrez & Philippon attempt to craft a causal linkage between differences in U.S. and EU antitrust enforcement and product market regulation to differences in market concentration and corporate profits. Their paper’s abstract leads with a bold assertion:

Until the 1990’s, US markets were more competitive than European markets. Today, European markets have lower concentration, lower excess profits, and lower regulatory barriers to entry.

This post focuses on Gutiérrez & Philippon’s claim that EU markets have lower “excess profits.” This is perhaps the most outrageous claim in the paper. If anyone bothers to read the full paper, they’ll see that claims that EU firms have lower excess profits is simply not supported by the paper itself. Aside from a passing mention of someone else’s work in a footnote, the only mention of “excess profits” is in the paper’s headline-grabbing abstract.

What’s even more outrageous is the authors don’t define (or even describe) what they mean by excess profits.

These two factors alone should be enough to toss aside the paper’s assertion about “excess” profits. But, there’s more.

Gutiérrez & Philippon define profit to be gross operating surplus and mixed income (known as “GOPS” in the OECD’s STAN Industrial Analysis dataset). GOPS is not the same thing as gross margin or gross profit as used in business and finance (for example GOPS subtracts wages, but gross margin does not). The EU defines GOPS as (emphasis added):

Operating surplus is the surplus (or deficit) on production activities before account has been taken of the interest, rents or charges paid or received for the use of assets. Mixed income is the remuneration for the work carried out by the owner (or by members of his family) of an unincorporated enterprise. This is referred to as ‘mixed income’ since it cannot be distinguished from the entrepreneurial profit of the owner.

Here’s Figure 1 from Gutiérrez & Philippon plotting GOPS as a share of gross output.

Fig1-GutierrezPhilippon

Look at the huge jump in gross operating surplus for U.S. firms!

Now, look at the scale of the y-axis. Not such a big jump after all.

Over 23 years, from 1992 to 2015, the gross operating surplus rate for U.S. firms grew by 2.5 percentage points. In the EU, the rate increased by about one percentage point.

Using the STAN dataset, I plotted the gross operating surplus rate for each EU country (blue dots) and the U.S. (red dots), along with a time trend. Three takeaways:

  1. There’s not much of a difference between the U.S. and the EU average—they both hover around a gross operating surplus rate of about 19.5 percent; and
  2. There’s a huge variation in gross operating surplus rate across EU countries.
  3. Yes, gross operating surplus is trending slightly upward in the U.S. and slightly downward for the EU average, but there doesn’t appear to be a huge difference in the slope of the trendlines. In fact the slopes of the trendlines are not statistically significantly different from zero and are not statistically significantly different from each other.

GOPSprod

The use of gross profits raises some serious questions. For example, the Stigler Center’s James Traina finds that, after accounting for selling, general, and administrative expenses (SG&A), mark-ups for publicly traded firms in the U.S. have not meaningfully increased since 1980.

The figure below plots net operating surplus (NOPS equals GOPS minus consumption of fixed capital)—which is not the same thing as net income for a business.

Same three takeaways:

  1. There’s not much of a difference between the U.S. and the EU average—they both hover around a net operating surplus rate of a little more than seven percent; and
  2. There’s a huge variation in net operating surplus rate across EU countries.
  3. The slope of the trendlines for net operating surplus in the U.S. and EU are not statistically significantly different from zero and are not statistically significantly different from each other.

NOPSprod

It’s very possible that U.S. firms are achieving higher and growing “excess” profits relative to EU firms. It’s also very possible they’re not. Despite the bold assertions of Gutiérrez & Philippon, the information presented in their paper provides no useful information one way or the other.

 

In antitrust, markets, truth on the market , , ,
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Don’t Miss the 2018 ICLE/Leeds Competition Law Conference: Have We Exceeded the Limits of Antitrust?

Geoffrey Manne —  23 October 2018

REGISTER HERE for the much-anticipated 2018 ICLE/Leeds competition law conference, this Friday and Saturday in Washington, DC.

NB: We’ve been approved for 8 credit hours of VA MCLE

The conference agenda is below. We hope to see you there!

ICLE/Leeds 2018 Competition Law Conference: Have We Exceeded the Limits of Antirust?
Agenda Day 1
Agenda Day 2
In administrative, announcements, antitrust, international center for law & economics , , , ,
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The DOJ’s Approval of the CVS/Aetna Merger and Vertical Innovation by Incumbents

Geoffrey Manne —  19 October 2018

Last week, the DOJ cleared the merger of CVS Health and Aetna (conditional on Aetna’s divesting its Medicare Part D business), a merger that, as I previously noted at a House Judiciary hearing, “presents a creative effort by two of the most well-informed and successful industry participants to try something new to reform a troubled system.” (My full testimony is available here).

Of course it’s always possible that the experiment will fail — that the merger won’t “revolutioniz[e] the consumer health care experience” in the way that CVS and Aetna are hoping. But it’s a low (antitrust) risk effort to address some of the challenges confronting the healthcare industry — and apparently the DOJ agrees.

I discuss the weakness of the antitrust arguments against the merger at length in my testimony. What I particularly want to draw attention to here is how this merger — like many vertical mergers — represents business model innovation by incumbents.

The CVS/Aetna merger is just one part of a growing private-sector movement in the healthcare industry to adopt new (mostly) vertical arrangements that seek to move beyond some of the structural inefficiencies that have plagued healthcare in the United States since World War II. Indeed, ambitious and interesting as it is, the merger arises amidst a veritable wave of innovative, vertical healthcare mergers and other efforts to integrate the healthcare services supply chain in novel ways.

These sorts of efforts (and the current DOJ’s apparent support for them) should be applauded and encouraged. I need not rehash the economic literature on vertical restraints here (see, e.g., Lafontaine & Slade, etc.). But especially where government interventions have already impaired the efficient workings of a market (as they surely have, in spades, in healthcare), it is important not to compound the error by trying to micromanage private efforts to restructure around those constraints.   

Current trends in private-sector-driven healthcare reform

In the past, the most significant healthcare industry mergers have largely been horizontal (i.e., between two insurance providers, or two hospitals) or “traditional” business model mergers for the industry (i.e., vertical mergers aimed at building out managed care organizations). This pattern suggests a sort of fealty to the status quo, with insurers interested primarily in expanding their insurance business or providers interested in expanding their capacity to provide medical services.

Today’s health industry mergers and ventures seem more frequently to be different in character, and they portend an industry-wide experiment in the provision of vertically integrated healthcare that we should enthusiastically welcome.

Drug pricing and distribution innovations

To begin with, the CVS/Aetna deal, along with the also recently approved Cigna-Express Scripts deal, solidifies the vertical integration of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) with insurers.

But a number of other recent arrangements and business models center around relationships among drug manufacturers, pharmacies, and PBMs, and these tend to minimize the role of insurers. While not a “vertical” arrangement, per se, Walmart’s generic drug program, for example, offers $4 prescriptions to customers regardless of insurance (the typical generic drug copay for patients covered by employer-provided health insurance is $11), and Walmart does not seek or receive reimbursement from health plans for these drugs. It’s been offering this program since 2006, but in 2016 it entered into a joint buying arrangement with McKesson, a pharmaceutical wholesaler (itself vertically integrated with Rexall pharmacies), to negotiate lower prices. The idea, presumably, is that Walmart will entice consumers to its stores with the lure of low-priced generic prescriptions in the hope that they will buy other items while they’re there. That prospect presumably makes it worthwhile to route around insurers and PBMs, and their reimbursements.

Meanwhile, both Express Scripts and CVS Health (two of the country’s largest PBMs) have made moves toward direct-to-consumer sales themselves, establishing pricing for a small number of drugs independently of health plans and often in partnership with drug makers directly.   

Also apparently focused on disrupting traditional drug distribution arrangements, Amazon has recently purchased online pharmacy PillPack (out from under Walmart, as it happens), and with it received pharmacy licenses in 49 states. The move introduces a significant new integrated distributor/retailer, and puts competitive pressure on other retailers and distributors and potentially insurers and PBMs, as well.

Whatever its role in driving the CVS/Aetna merger (and I believe it is smaller than many reports like to suggest), Amazon’s moves in this area demonstrate the fluid nature of the market, and the opportunities for a wide range of firms to create efficiencies in the market and to lower prices.

At the same time, the differences between Amazon and CVS/Aetna highlight the scope of product and service differentiation that should contribute to the ongoing competitiveness of these markets following mergers like this one.

While Amazon inarguably excels at logistics and the routinizing of “back office” functions, it seems unlikely for the foreseeable future to be able to offer (or to be interested in offering) a patient interface that can rival the service offerings of a brick-and-mortar CVS pharmacy combined with an outpatient clinic and its staff and bolstered by the capabilities of an insurer like Aetna. To be sure, online sales and fulfillment may put price pressure on important, largely mechanical functions, but, like much technology, it is first and foremost a complement to services offered by humans, rather than a substitute. (In this regard it is worth noting that McKesson has long been offering Amazon-like logistics support for both online and brick-and-mortar pharmacies. “‘To some extent, we were Amazon before it was cool to be Amazon,’ McKesson CEO John Hammergren said” on a recent earnings call).

Treatment innovations

Other efforts focus on integrating insurance and treatment functions or on bringing together other, disparate pieces of the healthcare industry in interesting ways — all seemingly aimed at finding innovative, private solutions to solve some of the costly complexities that plague the healthcare market.

Walmart, for example, announced a deal with Quest Diagnostics last year to experiment with offering diagnostic testing services and potentially other basic healthcare services inside of some Walmart stores. While such an arrangement may simply be a means of making doctor-prescribed diagnostic tests more convenient, it may also suggest an effort to expand the availability of direct-to-consumer (patient-initiated) testing (currently offered by Quest in Missouri and Colorado) in states that allow it. A partnership with Walmart to market and oversee such services has the potential to dramatically expand their use.

Capping off (for now) a buying frenzy in recent years that included the purchase of PBM, CatamaranRx, UnitedHealth is seeking approval from the FTC for the proposed merger of its Optum unit with the DaVita Medical Group — a move that would significantly expand UnitedHealth’s ability to offer medical services (including urgent care, outpatient surgeries, and health clinic services), give it a significant group of doctors’ clinics throughout the U.S., and turn UnitedHealth into the largest employer of doctors in the country. But of course this isn’t a traditional managed care merger — it represents a significant bet on the decentralized, ambulatory care model that has been slowly replacing significant parts of the traditional, hospital-centric care model for some time now.

And, perhaps most interestingly, some recent moves are bringing together drug manufacturers and diagnostic and care providers in innovative ways. Swiss pharmaceutical company, Roche, announced recently that “it would buy the rest of U.S. cancer data company Flatiron Health for $1.9 billion to speed development of cancer medicines and support its efforts to price them based on how well they work.” Not only is the deal intended to improve Roche’s drug development process by integrating patient data, it is also aimed at accommodating efforts to shift the pricing of drugs, like the pricing of medical services generally, toward an outcome-based model.

Similarly interesting, and in a related vein, early this year a group of hospital systems including Intermountain Health, Ascension, and Trinity Health announced plans to begin manufacturing generic prescription drugs. This development further reflects the perceived benefits of vertical integration in healthcare markets, and the move toward creative solutions to the unique complexity of coordinating the many interrelated layers of healthcare provision. In this case,

[t]he nascent venture proposes a private solution to ensure contestability in the generic drug market and consequently overcome the failures of contracting [in the supply and distribution of generics]…. The nascent venture, however it solves these challenges and resolves other choices, will have important implications for the prices and availability of generic drugs in the US.

More enforcement decisions like CVS/Aetna and Bayer/Monsanto; fewer like AT&T/Time Warner

In the face of all this disruption, it’s difficult to credit anticompetitive fears like those expressed by the AMA in opposing the CVS-Aetna merger and a recent CEA report on pharmaceutical pricing, both of which are premised on the assumption that drug distribution is unavoidably dominated by a few PBMs in a well-defined, highly concentrated market. Creative arrangements like the CVS-Aetna merger and the initiatives described above (among a host of others) indicate an ease of entry, the fluidity of traditional markets, and a degree of business model innovation that suggest a great deal more competitiveness than static PBM market numbers would suggest.

This kind of incumbent innovation through vertical restructuring is an increasingly important theme in antitrust, and efforts to tar such transactions with purported evidence of static market dominance is simply misguided.

While the current DOJ’s misguided (and, remarkably, continuing) attempt to stop the AT&T/Time Warner merger is an aberrant step in the wrong direction, the leadership at the Antitrust Division generally seems to get it. Indeed, in spite of strident calls for stepped-up enforcement in the always-controversial ag-biotech industry, the DOJ recently approved three vertical ag-biotech mergers in fairly rapid succession.

As I noted in a discussion of those ag-biotech mergers, but equally applicable here, regulatory humility should continue to carry the day when it comes to structural innovation by incumbent firms:

But it is also important to remember that innovation comes from within incumbent firms, as well, and, often, that the overall level of innovation in an industry may be increased by the presence of large firms with economies of scope and scale.

In sum, and to paraphrase Olympia Dukakis’ character in Moonstruck: “what [we] don’t know about [the relationship between innovation and market structure] is a lot.”

What we do know, however, is that superficial, concentration-based approaches to antitrust analysis will likely overweight presumed foreclosure effects and underweight innovation effects.

We shouldn’t fetishize entry, or access, or head-to-head competition over innovation, especially where consumer welfare may be significantly improved by a reduction in the former in order to get more of the latter.

In agriculture, agtech/biotech, antitrust, antitrust division, doj, error costs, exclusionary conduct, health care, markets, mergers & acquisitions, monopolization, vertical restraints , , , , , , , , , ,
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Calm Down about Common Ownership

Michael Sykuta —  13 September 2018

regulation-v41n3-cover“Calm Down about Common Ownership” is the title of a piece Thom Lambert and I published in the Fall 2018 issue of Regulation, which just hit online. The article is a condensed version our recent paper, “The Case for Doing Nothing About Institutional Investors’ Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms.” In short, we argue that concern about common ownership lacks a theoretically sound foundation and is built upon faulty empirical support. We also explain why proposed “fixes” would do more harm than good.

Over the past several weeks we wrote a series of blog posts here that summarize or expand upon different parts of our argument. To pull them all into one place:

In antitrust, common ownerhsip, doj, error costs, mutual funds, truth on the market , ,
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Amazon-Whole Foods symposium wrap-up

Geoffrey Manne & Kristian Stout —  29 August 2018

On Tuesday, August 28, 2018, Truth on the Market and the International Center for Law and Economics presented a blog symposium — Is Amazon’s Appetite Bottomless? The Whole Foods Merger After One Year — that looked at the concerns surrounding the closing of the Amazon-Whole Foods merger, and how those concerns had played out over the last year.

The difficulty presented by the merger was, in some ways, its lack of difficulty: Even critics, while hearkening back to the Brandeisian fear of large firms, had little by way of legal objection to offer against the merger. Despite the acknowledged lack of an obvious legal basis for challenging the merger, most critics nevertheless expressed a somewhat inchoate and generalized concern that the merger would hasten the death of brick-and-mortar retail and imperil competition in the grocery industry. Critics further pointed to particular, related issues largely outside the scope of modern antitrust law — issues relating to the presumed effects of the merger on “localism” (i.e., small, local competitors), retail workers, startups with ancillary businesses (e.g., delivery services), data collection and use, and the like.

Steven Horwitz opened the symposium with an insightful and highly recommended post detailing the development of the grocery industry from its inception. Tracing through that history, Horwitz was optimistic that

Viewed from the long history of the evolution of the grocery store, the Amazon-Whole Foods merger made sense as the start of the next stage of that historical process. The combination of increased wealth that is driving the demand for upscale grocery stores, and the corresponding increase in the value of people’s time that is driving the demand for one-stop shopping and various forms of pick-up and delivery, makes clear the potential benefits of this merger.

Others in the symposium similarly acknowledged the potential transformation of the industry brought on by the merger, but challenged the critics’ despairing characterization of that transformation (Auer, Manne & Stout, Rinehart, Fruits, Atkinson).

At the most basic level, it was noted that, in the immediate aftermath of the merger, Whole Foods dropped prices across a number of categories as it sought to shore up its competitive position (Auer). Further, under relevant antitrust metrics — e.g., market share, ease of competitive entry, potential for exclusionary conduct — the merger was completely unobjectionable under existing doctrine (Fruits).

To critics’ claims that Amazon in general, and the merger in particular, was decimating the retail industry, several posts discussed the updated evidence suggesting that retail is not actually on the decline (although some individual retailers are certainly struggling to compete) (Auer, Manne & Stout). Moreover, and following from Horwitz’s account of the evolution of the grocery industry, it appears that the actual trajectory of the industry is not an either/or between online and offline, but instead a movement toward integrating both models into a single retail experience (Manne & Stout). Further, the post-merger flurry of business model innovation, venture capital investment, and new startup activity demonstrates that, confronted with entrepreneurial competitors like Walmart, Kroger, Aldi, and Instacart, Amazon’s impressive position online has not translated into an automatic domination of the traditional grocery industry (Manne & Stout).  

Symposium participants more circumspect about the merger suggested that Amazon’s behavior may be laying the groundwork for an eventual monopsony case (Sagers). Further, it was suggested, a future Section 2 case, difficult under prevailing antitrust orthodoxy, could be brought with a creative approach to market definition in light of Amazon’s conduct with its marketplace participants, its aggressive ebook contracting practices, and its development and roll-out of its own private label brands (Sagers).

Skeptics also picked up on early critics’ concerns about the aggregation of large amounts of consumer data, and worried that the merger could be part of a pattern representing a real, long-term threat to consumers that antitrust does not take seriously enough (Bona & Levitsky). Sounding a further alarm, Hal Singer noted that Amazon’s interest in pushing into new markets with data generated by, for example, devices like its Echo line could bolster its ability to exclude competitors.

More fundamentally, these contributors echoed the merger critics’ concerns that antitrust does not adequately take account of other values such as “promoting local, community-based, organic food production or ‘small firms’ in general.” (Bona & Levitsky; Singer).

Rob Atkinson, however, pointed out that these values are idiosyncratic and not likely shared by the vast majority of the population — and that antitrust law shouldn’t have anything to do with them:

In short, most of the opposition to Amazon/Whole Foods merger had little or nothing to do with economics and consumer welfare. It had everything to do with a competing vision for the kind of society we want to live in. The neo-Brandesian opponents, who Lind and I term “progressive localists”, seek an alternative economy predominantly made up of small firms, supported by big government and protected from global competition.

And Dirk Auer noted that early critics’ prophecies of foreclosure of competition through “data leveraging” and below-cost pricing hadn’t remotely come to pass, thus far.

Meanwhile, other contributors noted the paucity of evidence supporting many of these assertions, and pointed out the manifest value the merger seemed to be creating by pressuring competitors to adapt and better respond to consumers’ preferences (Horwitz, Rinehart, Auer, Fruits, Manne & Stout) — in the process shoring up, rather than killing, even smaller retailers that are willing and able to evolve with changing technology and shifting consumer preferences. “For all the talk of retail dying, the stores that are actually dying are the ones that fail to cater to their customers, not the ones that happen to be offline” (Manne & Stout).

At the same time, not all merger skeptics were moved by the Neo-Brandeisian assertions. Chris Sagers, for example, finds much of the populist antitrust objection more public relations than substance. He suggested perhaps not taking these ideas and their promoters so seriously, and instead focusing on antitrust advocates with “real ideas” (like Sagers himself, of course).

Coming from a different angle, Will Rinehart also suggested not taking the criticisms too seriously, pointing to the evolving and complicated effects of the merger as Exhibit A for the need for regulatory humility:

Finally, this deal reiterates the need for regulatory humility. Almost immediately after the Amazon-Whole Foods merger was closed, prices at the store dropped and competitors struck a flurry of deals. Investments continue and many in the grocery retail space are bracing for a wave of enhancement to take hold. Even some of the most fierce critics of deal will have to admit there is a lot of uncertainty. It is unclear what business model will make the most sense in the long run, how these technologies will ultimately become embedded into production processes, and how consumers will benefit. Combined, these features underscore the difficulty, but the necessity, in implementing dynamic insights into antitrust institutions.

Offering generous praise for this symposium (thanks, Will!) and echoing the points made by other participants regarding the dynamic and unknowable course of competition (Auer, Horwitz, Manne & Stout, Fruits), Rinehart concludes:

Retrospectives like this symposium offer a chance to understand what the discussion missed at the time and what is needed to better understand innovation and competition in markets. While it might be too soon to close the book on this case, the impact can already be felt in the positions others are taking in response. In the end, the deal probably won’t be remembered for extending Amazon’s dominance into another market because that is a phantom concern. Rather, it will probably be best remembered as the spark that drove traditional retail outlets to modernize their logistics and fulfillment efforts.  

For a complete rundown of the arguments both for and against, the full archive of symposium posts from our outstanding and diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and other experts is available at this link, and individual posts can be easily accessed by clicking on the authors’ names below.

We’d like to thank all of the participants for their excellent contributions!

 

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The Amazon-Whole Foods merger: Natural and organic competition in the evolving grocery industry

Geoffrey Manne & Kristian Stout —  28 August 2018

What actually happened in the year following the merger is nearly the opposite: Competition among grocery stores has been more fierce than ever. “Offline” retailers are expanding — and innovating — to meet Amazon’s challenge, and many of them are booming. Disruption is never neat and tidy, but, in addition to saving Whole Foods from potential oblivion, the merger seems to have lit a fire under the rest of the industry.
This result should not be surprising to anyone who understands the nature of the competitive process. But it does highlight an important lesson: competition often comes from unexpected quarters and evolves in unpredictable ways, emerging precisely out of the kinds of adversity opponents of the merger bemoaned.

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Whole Foods? Seriously? Why Are We Talking About Whole Foods?

Chris Sagers —  28 August 2018

So why this deal, in this symposium, and why now? The best substantive reason I could think of is admittedly one that I personally find important. As I said, I think we should take it much more seriously as a general matter, especially in highly dynamic contexts like Silicon Valley. There has been a history of arguably pre-emptive, market-occupying vertical and conglomerate acquisitions, by big firms of smaller ones that are technologically or otherwise disruptive. The idea is that the big firms sit back and wait as some new market develops in some adjacent sector. When that new market ripens to the point of real promise, the big firm buys some significant incumbent player. The aim is not. just to facilitate its own benevolent, wholesome entry, but to set up hopefully prohibitive challenges to other de novo entrants. Love it or leave it, that theory plausibly characterizes lots and lots of acquisitions in recent decades that secured easy antitrust approval, precisely because they weren’t obviously, presently horizontal. Many people think that is true of some of Amazon’s many acquisitions, like its notoriously aggressive, near-hostile takeover of Diapers.com.

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