The recipients of the 20th Annual Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship were announced today by Cohen Milstein. Each year, AAI hosts the presentation of this award. The award is administered by the law firm he founded, Cohen Milstein. The award was created through a trust established in honor of the late Jerry S. Cohen, an outstanding trial lawyer and antitrust writer and given each year to the best antitrust writing during the prior year that is consistent with the following standards established by the Board of Trustees of the Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund.
Colleen Cunningham, Florian Ederer, and Song Ma were selected as 2022 winners for their article, “Killer Acquisitions,” 129 J. Pol. Econ. 649 (2021). The article argues that incumbent firms may acquire innovative targets solely to discontinue the target’s innovation projects and preempt future competition. The authors develop an economic model illustrating this phenomenon and then empirically quantify its prevalence using pharmaceutical industry data. They find that at least 5% of the acquisitions in their sample qualify as “killer acquisitions” and that those acquisitions tend to cluster right below the thresholds for antitrust scrutiny.
In addition, this year’s award selection committee has conferred seven category awards, as follows:
- Best Antitrust Article of 2021 on Labor Monopsony: Elena Prager and Matt Schmitt for “Employer Consolidation and Wages: Evidence from Hospitals,” 111 Am. Econ. Rev. 397 (2021).
- Best Antitrust Student Note of 2021: Candice Yandam Riviere for “The Legal Causes of Labor Market Power in the U.S. Agriculture Sector,” 88 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1555 (2021).
- Best Antitrust Article of 2021 on Monopolization: Michael A. Carrier and Rebecca Tushnet for “An Antitrust Framework for False Advertising,” 106 Iowa L. Rev. 1841 (2021).
- Best Antitrust Article of 2021 on Common Ownership: Einer Elhauge for “The Causal Mechanisms of Horizontal Shareholding,” 82 Ohio St. L.J. 1 (2021).
- Best Antitrust Article of 2021 on Vertical Mergers: William P. Rogerson for “The Upstream Pass-Through Rate, Bargaining Power, and the Magnitude of the Raising Rivals’ Costs (RRC) Effect,” 59 Rev. Ind. Org. 205 (2021).
- Best Antitrust Article of 2021 on Merger Retrospectives: Nathan H. Miller, Gloria Sheu and Matthew C. Weinberg for “Oligopolistic Price Leadership and Mergers: The United States Beer Industry,” 111 Am. Econ. Rev. 3123 (2021).
- Best Antitrust Article of 2021 on Coordinated Effects: Simon Loertscher and Leslie M. Marx for “Coordinated Effects in Merger Review,” 64 J.L. & Econ. 705 (2021).
This year’s award selection committee consisted of Zachary Caplan, Shareholder at Berger Montague; Warren Grimes, Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School; John Kirkwood, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law; Roger Noll, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford University; Leslie Marx, Professor of Economics at Duke Fuqua School of Business; Robert Lande, Professor of Law at University of Baltimore School of Law; Daniel A. Small, Partner at Cohen Milstein; and Daniel H. Silverman, Partner at Cohen Milstein. (Professor Marx recused herself from deliberations relating to her own article.)
