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PUBLIC CHOICE CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS IN LAW. By Maxwell L. Sterns & Todd J. Zywicki. St. Paul: West. 2009. Pp. liv, 601. $70. INTRODUCTION Many top elected and appointed federal [...]

Partial ownership of stock in multiple competing firms is an important topic in both corporate and antitrust law. Until now, the discussion has focused on ownership. This Article shifts the discussion from a focus on common ownership to a focus on common control. No prior work has addressed the role of debtrelated corporate control in corporate governance and competition, but debtcontrol- based governance is a critical part of the corporate landscape. Further, various creditors can exert control over more than one company in the same industry without any ownership. These insights have been addressed in the corporate finance and bankruptcy law literatures, but they have not yet penetrated antitrust debates or policy. Applying such insights, this Article suggests that a fundamental change in antitrust policy is necessary to police against debt-control-based collusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: This article investigates the impacts of Airbnb on hotel demand and the price and nonprice response strategies of incumbent hotels to Airbnb. We constructed a unique dataset of tourist hotels and Airbnb listings before and after the entry of Airbnb in Taiwan. We found that the entry of Airbnb makes the hotel industry more heterogeneous. Low quality hotels compete on price with Airbnb after Airbnb's entry. In contrast, prices and the investment in service quality increase for high quality hotels. These findings suggest that high quality hotels reposition themselves in the higher end of the lodging market as a response strategy to the entry of Airbnb. Managerial Summary: Incumbent hotels can use a number of strategies to respond to Airbnb's entry. Using a unique dataset of Taiwanese data from before and after Airbnb's entry, we found that hotels' responses differ across the value chain. Low quality hotels compete on price with Airbnb after Airbnb's entry. In contrast, prices and the investment in service quality increase for high quality hotels. The increase of investment in service quality allows high quality hotels to reposition themselves in the higher end of the lodging market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In rapid succession, a number of jurisdictions have moved away from focusing on antitrust enforcement to the proposed regulation of digital platforms. Ostensibly, the regulatory focus is about competition and potential concerns that traditional ex post enforcement may be ill-equipped to address the power of digital platforms. This article focuses on the realities of what platform regulation might mean, and how to better frame and structure the nature of appropriate regulation. This article first identifies a number of the different approaches to regulation that various jurisdictions have put forward, and then lays out six basic principles for platform regulation to help address some of the potential harms that such approaches may unwittingly be pursuing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government enforcement against collusion, now viewed by the Supreme Court as the "supreme evil" in antitrust, has gone through various phases of enforcement in the United States. There have been periods in which cartels have been able to collude more or less effectively given various institutional tools at the disposal of the government. By analyzing enforcement and prosecutions data over a long time horizon, 1969-2016, this Article examines the attributes of cartel enforcement over time and the changing use of tools to assist with detection and punishment. We provide a comprehensive description of critical cartel enforcement events and institutional developments from 1890 to the present. Our examination of the data includes a detailed descriptive analysis which tends to reveal three broad phases of U.S. cartel enforcement and prosecutions. The most recent data indicate a marked decline in the number of prosecutions, but sharp increase in per capita penalties. We also conduct regression-based estimation of the potential quantitative impact of the key institutional innovations to foster detection and prosecutions. Based on the raw data as well as our estimation, we comment on the potential factors that may be driving lower prosecutions in the more recent years. Finally, we briefly compare some key data between U.S. and European Commission cartel prosecutions to examine potential dynamic interlinkages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the economics of vertical mergers and vertical restraints. Topics include vertical integration refers to a firm's decision to operate at two stages in the production and distribution of a product; and vertical mergers generate a more complex set of unilateral incentives, some of which typically benefit consumers and some of which typically harm consumers.