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AAI Tells FTC That Disclosure, Without Competition, Is Not Enough to Protect Consumers from Personalized Pricing

On September 25, 2026, AAI filed public comments in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s Proposed Enforcement Policy Statement Regarding Personalized Pricing (Matter No. P034101).

The Commission’s Proposed Statement addresses businesses’ growing use of consumers’ personal data to set individualized prices. The Statement concludes that where consumers reasonably expect prices not to vary based on their personal data, businesses should clearly and conspicuously disclose that a price is personalized, the basis for the personalization, and the types of data used, and that failing to do so is likely to be an unfair or deceptive act or practice under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The Commission expressly declined to take a position on whether some personalized pricing practices are unfair even when fully disclosed.

AAI’s comments commend the Commission for confronting personalized pricing but argue that the Statement risks ignoring the practice’s other potential consumer harms by relying solely on disclosure instead of an in-depth examination of the role of competitive conditions. Whether personalization lowers prices or extracts consumer surplus depends on the competition a seller faces. Disclosure can correct an information gap, but it cannot give a consumer an alternative she does not have. In several of the Statement’s own examples, such as the rideshare customer headed to an emergency room, disclosure lets the consumer see the higher price without giving her any way to avoid it.

AAI’s comments make the following recommendations:

Competitive Conditions in the Section 5 Analysis

  • The Commission should acknowledge that personalized pricing may be unfair even when fully disclosed, particularly where consumers lack practical alternatives.
  • The Commission should make competitive conditions an explicit part of its unfairness analysis, rather than assuming that competition disciplines personalized prices.
  • The Commission should recognize that a higher personalized price is not reasonably avoidable when the consumer has no practical alternative, especially where the seller has identified that absence and priced on it.
  • The Commission should assess claimed countervailing benefits against the market as it actually exists, not an idealized competitive one.
  • The Commission should recognize that sustained personalized pricing may be evidence of market power.

Preserving the Commission’s Competition Authorities

  • The Commission should make clear that disclosure is not a safe harbor under Section 5 or any other law the Commission enforces, including the Sherman and Clayton Acts.
  • The Commission should treat a firm’s disclosures about its pricing as evidence in competition enforcement, not as a defense.
  • The Commission should apply its exclusionary-conduct standards with targeted pricing in view and scrutinize exclusive arrangements over the consumer data that personalization requires.
  • The Commission should assess how mergers, including acquisitions of data assets and personalization vendors, affect personalized pricing capability and the consumers who lose their closest alternative.

Algorithmic Pricing and Coordination

  • The Commission should recognize that personalized pricing vendors serving competing sellers raise the same coordination concerns as other algorithmic pricing intermediaries, whether through pooled data or through shared or correlated pricing models.
  • The Commission should treat evidence that a firm chose a pricing model because its rivals use it as probative of coordination under Section 1 of the Sherman Act and of an unfair method of competition under Section 5.

Designing Disclosure with Competition in Mind

  • The Commission should recognize that disclosure serves competition as well as consumer protection, because concealment prevents the price comparisons that discipline personalized pricing.
  • The Commission should confirm that disclosures are for consumers, not a channel for sharing competitively sensitive pricing information among rivals, and that the Statement provides no immunity for information exchange among competitors.

Further Study and Enforcement

  • The Commission should use its Section 6(b) and compulsory process authority to examine whether personalization vendors pool data or supply correlated models to competing clients, whether exclusive data arrangements facilitate exclusionary conduct, and whether mergers create asymmetric access to consumer data.
  • The Commission should build a demand-side record of which firms actually deploy personalized pricing and its effect on prices and issue a comprehensive final report.

These comments build on AAI’s recent work on algorithmic pricing, including its comments on revised competitor collaboration guidelines, its comments on the DOJ’s RealPage settlement, and its amicus briefs in Cornish-Adebiyi v. Caesars Entertainment and Gibson v. Cendyn. The comments were written by Kathleen Bradish, AAI VP and Director of Legal Advocacy, and Beryl Emmerich, AAI Research Fellow, with assistance from Randy Stutz, AAI President, and David Fisher, AAI Senior Counsel.

Read the complete comments here: AAI Comments on FTC Proposed Enforcement Policy Statement Regarding Personalized Pricing

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Antitrust Settlements, Transparency, and the Tunney Act: A Conversation with Darren Bush

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President Randy Stutz sits down with Professor Darren Bush of the University of Houston Law Center to discuss the Antitrust Penalties and Procedures Act of 1974, better known as the Tunney Act, and its role in promoting transparency and judicial scrutiny of DOJ antitrust settlements.

Federal antitrust enforcement today relies heavily on negotiated settlements rather than litigation. While settlements can conserve public resources, shorten the duration of anticompetitive conduct, and provide relief without the costs and delay of trial, they also raise important transparency concerns because negotiations occur behind closed doors and affected members of the public are not at the table. The Tunney Act was designed in part to address those concerns by requiring public disclosure, an opportunity for public comment, and judicial review of DOJ consent decrees under a public-interest standard.

Stutz and Bush discuss the origins of the Tunney Act and the political controversy surrounding the ITT settlement that helped spur its enactment (5:50); the Act’s disclosure and public-comment requirements (7:40); and the important distinction between pre-complaint consent decrees governed by the Tunney Act and settlements reached after litigation has begun and testimony has been taken (11:32).

They then trace the evolution of judicial review under the Act, including the AT&T and Microsoft cases, the emergence of highly deferential review in the D.C. Circuit, and Congress’s 2004 amendments aimed at strengthening meaningful judicial scrutiny (19:21). Bush explains why, in his view, courts have continued to treat many Tunney Act proceedings too deferentially notwithstanding those amendments.

The conversation also turns to recent settlements that have renewed attention on the Tunney Act. Stutz and Bush examine the DOJ settlement of the HPE–Juniper merger challenge, the discovery ordered by the district court into the settlement process, concerns about political influence and remedies unrelated to competitive harm, and the court’s ultimate decision to enter the decree (25:47). They also discuss the developing Tunney Act proceeding involving DOJ’s settlement with Live Nation and the broader question whether courts should scrutinize not only the substance of antitrust settlements but also the integrity of the process by which they were reached.

Finally, Stutz and Bush consider possible reforms, including proposals to extend Tunney Act-style review to Federal Trade Commission settlements and to clarify the respective roles of prosecutorial discretion and judicial review in evaluating government antitrust settlements (37:34).

GUEST:

Darren Bush, Professor of Law and Bobby Wayne Young Chair on Consumer Law, University of Houston Law Center

HOST:

Randy Stutz, President, American Antitrust Institute

LINKS:

John J. Flynn & Darren Bush, The Misuse and Abuse of the Tunney Act: The Adverse Consequences of the “Microsoft Fallacies”

Darren Bush, The Death of the Tunney Act at the Hands of an Activist D.C. Circuit

Darren Bush, The Fatally Flawed HPE-Juniper Decision

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AAI Urges District Court to Reject Narrow Reading of the Tunney Act and Investigate Public Reports Suggesting a Side Deal in the Live Nation-Ticketmaster Settlement

On September 4, 2026, AAI filed public comments in United States v. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-03973 (S.D.N.Y. filed May 24, 2024), urging the court to apply the correct standard of review under the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act (the “Tunney Act”) before determining whether the Department of Justice’s proposed settlement of its monopolization case against Live Nation and Ticketmaster is “within the reaches of the public interest” under the Act.

AAI’s comments argue that a settlement compromised by an undisclosed side deal cannot be within the reaches of the public interest as a matter of law, and that numerous credible reports raise questions about whether that is what happened here. Those reports suggest DOJ may have accepted materially less relief than its complaint said was “necessary”—including forgoing the divestiture of Ticketmaster it had called for “at minimum”—in exchange for Live Nation’s help improving bookings at the Kennedy Center, following a lobbying campaign that reportedly reached the Oval Office and led the government’s own trial team and state co-plaintiffs to be cut out of the negotiations. Thirty-four states declined to join the federal settlement, proceeded to trial on the same evidence, and won a unanimous verdict awarding the highest per-ticket damages figure their expert had calculated, undercutting any suggestion that DOJ settled for less than the minimum necessary divestiture because its litigation position had weakened.

AAI’s comments trace the Tunney Act’s history to a Nixon administration scandal in 1971 that also involved a suspected side deal reached in settling an antitrust case, which prompted Congress to write extensive public-notice, transparency, and lobbying-disclosure requirements into the settlement-review process. That history, AAI argues, forecloses the position DOJ recently pressed in the Tunney Act proceeding concerning its settlement with Hewlett Packard Enterprises: that judicial review under the Act cannot reach the government’s motivations for settling at all. AAI’s comments show that argument to be squarely at odds with both the statute’s text and its legislative history, and they urge the court to conduct the “meaningful review” of DOJ’s settlement motivations that the Tunney Act was designed to make possible, and which is meant to protect the public interest in competitive markets by assuring public confidence in the consent decree process.

Read AAIs comments here.

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AAI Files Comments Asking FTC to Fill in Blanks in its Explanation of Caremark PBM Settlement in Insulin Pricing Case

The American Antitrust Institute (“AAI”) filed public comments with the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) on September 4, 2026, on the agency’s proposed settlement with Caremark Rx, L.L.C. and Zinc Health Services, LLC.

Caremark is the second of the three largest pharmacy benefit managers (“PBMs”) to settle in the FTC’s insulin pricing case. The comments follow AAI’s March 2026 comments on the proposed Express Scripts order in the same docket. AAI again applauds the FTC for pursuing PBMs’ anticompetitive conduct under Section 5 of the FTC Act but notes that the central flaw AAI identified in March remains under the new settlement.

As in the Express Scripts order, the Caremark order’s core prohibitions reach only Caremark’s “Standard Offering,” and the order permits a plan sponsor and Caremark to negotiate terms that differ from it. That structure ignores that a plan sponsor may find it more profitable to split the gains from the prohibited practices with the PBM than to pass them to the patients who bear the costs. The settlement’s effectiveness thus continues to rest on the judgment of entities whose incentives the Commission has not addressed. Moreover, a complete public record is lacking. On that score, the FTC’s Analysis of Agreement Containing Consent Order to Aid Public Comment falls short in three respects.

First, the settlement quietly releases an FTC investigation of Aetna Inc. that the public has never been told about. Aetna, the insurance affiliate that sits alongside Caremark under CVS Health, is not a respondent in the insulin pricing case, is not charged in the complaint, and did not sign the agreement. Yet its fully insured health plans carry obligations under the order, and the Consent Agreement releases all claims arising from a Commission investigation of Aetna that appears to be related to this docket but is unexplained in any public document. Nothing on the record says what conduct that investigation concerned, what the evidence showed, or why it is being resolved now.

Second, the Consent Agreement puts limits on the FTC’s ability to address CVS Health’s post-settlement conduct in future reports from the agency’s own 6(b) study of PBM practices. The 6(b) study is among the principal public sources of information about the PBM industry, and the Analysis does not mention this commitment at all.

Third, the Analysis describes the order’s ban on rebate guarantees more broadly than the order imposes, omitting without explanation a proviso that preserves Caremark’s TrueCost program and per-member-per-month net cost guarantees.

AAI takes no position on whether the Commission should have agreed to any of these terms, because the public record contains too little to permit that judgment, and that is the point. The concern is sharpened by the settlement’s posture: the Commission voted 1-0-1 to accept it, with Commissioner Meador recused, leaving the comment record as the only remaining input before the order becomes final. AAI asks the Commission, as it has when so warranted in the past, to publish a supplemental Analysis addressing each of these matters and to reopen the comment period before finalizing the order. AAI also renews the request it made in March that the Commission close the contracting-around route by clarifying that no plan sponsor may negotiate around the order’s core patient protections.

AAI’s public comments were written by AAI Vice President & Director of Legal Advocacy Kathleen Bradish.

Read the comments: AAI’s Comments on the Proposed Settlement with Caremark Rx, L.L.C. and Zinc Health Services, LLC. 

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The FTC After Trump v. Slaughter Conference: Rapporteur’s Report

On August 3, 2026, the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) and the Competition Law Center at the George Washington University Law School hosted The FTC After Trump v. Slaughter. This conference brought together former Commissioners, academics, former agency officials, and practitioners to evaluate how Congress, the Commission, and the courts can preserve transparency, accountability, institutional integrity, and effective competition enforcement while respecting the Supreme Court’s decision. Drawing on recent scholarship and reform proposals, the program explored both administrative reforms that could be implemented immediately and legislative reforms that may be necessary to ensure the FTC remains an expert, trusted, and effective competition agency.

Read the full report: The FTC After Trump v. Slaughter: Rapporteur’s Report

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AAI Urges Fourth Circuit to Reject Heightened Pleading Requirements and Expansion of Noerr Immunity in Pharmaceutical Monopolization Case (CareFirst v. Amgen)

The American Antitrust Institute (AAI) filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in CareFirst of Maryland, Inc. v. Amgen Inc. (No. 26-10394), urging affirmance of the district court’s denial of Amgen’s motion to dismiss plaintiff purchasers’ Section 2 monopolization case involving the blockbuster drug Enbrel.

According to CareFirst’s complaint, Amgen—which held a patent over Enbrel that was set to expire in 2012—entered into an agreement with Roche under which it acquired an exclusive license to Roche’s then-pending patent application for etanercept, the active ingredient in Enbrel. CareFirst alleged that the agreement prevented Roche and other potential competitors from entering the market for etanercept, extending Amgen’s monopoly over the drug beyond the terms of its lawful patent and causing CareFirst and other purchasers to pay higher prices for the drug.

The district court denied Amgen’s motion to dismiss after finding that CareFirst had suffered an antitrust injury and that Amgen was not immunized under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine. On appeal, Amgen argues that the alleged overcharges were not caused by the licensing agreement, but by subsequent court orders enforcing its patent rights, and that its agreement with Roche cannot give rise to antitrust liability because it is protected under Noerr-Pennington or otherwise immune from antitrust scrutiny.

In its brief, AAI argues that Amgen’s causation arguments would improperly impose a heightened pleading requirement on antitrust plaintiffs. Like other civil plaintiffs, antitrust plaintiffs need only plausibly allege causation at the motion-to-dismiss stage. CareFirst therefore need not disprove Amgen’s competing theory that subsequent patent-enforcement litigation, rather than the challenged licensing agreement, caused its injuries. It only need plausibly allege that the licensing agreement was a material cause of its overpayments. AAI also argues that Amgen incorrectly conflates causation on the merits with the antitrust-injury element of antitrust standing. CareFirst alleges that Amgen’s exclusive agreement excluded potential competitors, reduced competition, and contributed to higher prices. Those allegations plausibly describe an injury stemming from the competition-reducing effect of the challenged conduct and therefore satisfy the antitrust-injury requirement.

AAI also urges the Fourth Circuit to reject Amgen’s proposed expansion of Noerr-Pennington immunity and its argument that the acquisition of a pending patent application cannot give rise to antitrust liability. Although Noerr protects efforts to petition the government, AAI argues that Amgen’s acquisition of exclusive rights to Roche’s pending patent application was a commercial transaction, not petitioning activity. The fact that Amgen later sought and enforced patent rights does not immunize the antecedent commercial agreement from antitrust scrutiny. Extending Noerr in that fashion would substantially expand an implied antitrust immunity that the Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed courts to construe narrowly.

AAI also addresses Amgen’s argument that exempting the acquisition of pending patent applications from antitrust liability is necessary to protect innovation, explaining that antitrust law and patent law both serve to promote innovation and that exempting such acquisitions from antitrust scrutiny could serve to thwart innovation by incentivizing drugmakers to invest in exclusive licenses rather than in research and development of new drugs.

The brief was written by AAI Senior Counsel David O. Fisher with assistance from AAI President Randy Stutz, AAI Senior Counsel Mark S. Hegedus, and former AAI intern Addison Wagner.

Read the brief: CareFirst v. Amgen

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AAI Urges Fifth Circuit to Clarify Antitrust Injury Doctrine in X Advertiser Boycott Case (X v. World Federation of Advertisers)

The American Antitrust Institute (AAI) filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in X v. World Federation of Advertisers, No. 26-10394, urging the court to clarify the distinction between the antitrust injury requirement and the substantive elements of an antitrust violation. AAI filed in support of neither party.

The case arises from allegations by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) that major national advertisers, acting through the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by collectively withholding advertising from X. The district court dismissed X’s claims, finding both that X failed to allege harm to competition and that it failed to allege antitrust injury.

AAI’s brief takes no position on whether X’s complaint should ultimately be dismissed. It argues that the district court conflated two distinct inquiries. Antitrust injury asks whether a private plaintiff’s claimed injury stems from a competition-reducing aspect of the alleged violation and is therefore the type of injury Congress authorized plaintiffs to redress. Whether the challenged conduct actually harms competition, by contrast, goes to the merits of the alleged antitrust violation.

AAI explains that courts applying the antitrust injury doctrine should assume the existence of an antitrust violation and ask whether the plaintiff’s alleged injury flows from the competition-reducing aspect of that violation. Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent follow that approach. If a court instead determines that the complaint does not plausibly allege harm to competition, AAI argues, it should resolve that issue on the merits under the pleading standard established in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, rather than recast the deficiency as a lack of antitrust injury, which is an element of antitrust standing.

Applying that distinction, AAI argues that X has adequately alleged antitrust injury. X alleges that a group of buyers with collective monopsony power boycotted X as a seller of digital advertising space, preventing X from competing for advertising sales and depriving it of resulting revenue. Assuming the alleged boycott unlawfully reduced competition, those losses flow from the competition-reducing aspect of the alleged conduct. Whether X has plausibly alleged that the boycott actually harmed competition is a separate question on which AAI takes no position.

AAI urges the Fifth Circuit to clarify that when a court concludes that a plaintiff has failed to plausibly allege harm to competition, it has no occasion to consider antitrust injury. The proper inquiry is instead whether the complaint states a substantive antitrust claim under Twombly.

The brief was written by AAI President Randy Stutz with assistance from AAI Senior Counsel David O. Fisher.

Read the full brief: AAI Amicus Brief in X v. World Federation of Advertisers

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AAI Urges D.C. Circuit to Affirm Google’s Liability But Strengthen the Remedy in Landmark Search Monopoly Case (United States v. Google)

On August 4, 2026, the American Antitrust Institute (AAI) filed an amicus brief in United States v. Google LLC, No. 26-5023, asking the D.C. Circuit to affirm the district court’s finding that Google unlawfully maintained its search monopoly but remand the remedial order with instructions to prohibit Google’s payment-for-default mechanism, which the district court’s liability opinion condemned but its remedy opinion left in place.

After a nine-week bench trial, the district court found that Google entered revenue-sharing arrangements with browser makers, device manufacturers, and other search access points, conditioning those payments on Google’s status as the distributor’s exclusive default search engine. The court found that these arrangements foreclosed a substantial share of the market, prevented rivals from gaining scale, and diminished rivals’ incentives to invest and innovate. It entered equitable relief that, among other things, imposed data and syndication remedies but permitted Google to continue paying for default placement. On appeal, Google argues, among other things, that its conduct was not exclusionary but rather competition on the merits, contending that plaintiffs must show that a rival would have won default placement in a counterfactual world without Google’s payments.

AAI’s brief argues that the district court committed no error in finding liability but erred in fashioning the remedy. On liability, AAI explains that Google’s proposed “but-for world” exclusionary-conduct standard—which would require plaintiffs to prove that a rival would have obtained default status absent Google’s payments—has no basis in Supreme Court or D.C. Circuit precedent and would defeat the consumer-welfare purpose of Section 2. The standard contravenes Microsoft, which declined to condition a finding of exclusionary conduct on proof that rivals would have prevailed in a counterfactual market, and it systematically warps the balance of error costs by effectively immunizing the most entrenched monopolists, whose conduct makes counterfactual reconstruction impossible. A monopolist that pays distributors out of its monopoly profits to foreclose rivals—rather than competing on the merits of its product—is engaged in precisely the conduct antitrust law is designed to prevent.

On the remedy, AAI argues that while the district court’s data and syndication remedies should be affirmed, the court erred by permitting Google to continue paying for default placement, the very bargain its liability opinion condemned. Antitrust remedial discretion, although broad, is bounded by a non-negotiable effectiveness requirement: relief must reach the whole of the violation. By preserving the payment-for-default mechanism while acknowledging that doing so “could blunt the effectiveness of the remedies imposed,” the district court allowed a consideration governing the choice among effective remedies to excuse its failure to impose one.

The brief was written by AAI Vice President Kathleen Bradish and AAI President Randy Stutz, with assistance from AAI General Counsel Mark Hegedus and AAI Senior Counsel David O. Fisher.

Read the full brief: AAI Amicus Brief in United States v. Google LLC

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Does Common Leadership Facilitate Collusion? A Conversation with Ellie Prager

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI Senior Counsel David O. Fisher sits down with economist Ellie Prager to discuss her paper, Collusion Through Common Leadership, co-authored with Alejandro Herrera-Caicedo and Jessica Jeffers and accepted for publication in the Journal of Political Economy.

The episode continues a discussion begun in the previous episode of Ruled by Reason about interlocking directorates, or what Professor Prager and her co-authors call “common leadership.” Whereas the term “interlocking directorates” traditionally refers to one person sitting on the boards of two companies, common leadership also encompasses arrangements in which an executive of one company simultaneously serves on the board of another.

Professor Prager and her co-authors examine whether common leadership is associated with a greater likelihood of collusion. Using evidence from litigation involving no-poach agreements among Silicon Valley companies, they find that the arrival of a common leader increases the probability that two companies will enter into a collusive agreement by 11 percentage points—a ninefold increase over the rate among company pairs without common leaders.

Fisher and Prager discuss the distinction between interlocking directorates and common leadership (3:34); the paper’s central finding connecting common leadership to collusion (5:03); how evidence from the Silicon Valley no-poach litigation made it possible to study that connection empirically (11:07); why some of the common-leadership arrangements studied were outside the current scope of Section 8 of the Clayton Act (14:22); and how the authors used company-leadership data and econometric methods to distinguish causation from correlation (16:22).

They also explore whether product-market overlap, labor-market overlap, or common ownership could explain the results (21:21); the relationship between common leadership and the broader common-ownership literature (26:15); possible efficiencies arising from information sharing and improved corporate governance (31:37); whether common leadership may be part of a preexisting plan to collude (33:42); and the limits of extrapolating from the particular companies and labor markets examined in the study (39:14).

Finally, Fisher and Prager consider the implications for antitrust policy and enforcement, including whether the findings support increased enforcement of Section 8, the use of common leadership as an investigative signal of possible collusion, and expanding Section 8 to cover competition in labor and other input markets (41:56).

GUEST:

Ellie Prager, Assistant Professor, Simon Business School, University of Rochester, and Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research

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Interlocking Directorates and the Antitrust Laws: A Conversation Between Roger Noll and Mark Lemley, Jerry S. Cohen Award Winner for Antitrust Scholarship

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, guest host Roger Noll, Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University and a member of the Jerry S. Cohen Award Selection Committee, sits down with Mark Lemley, the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. The two discuss Professor Lemley’s award-winning article, Anticompetitive Directors, 125 Colum. L. Rev. 1939 (2025), co-authored with Professor Rory Van Loo of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Lane Miles, a 2025 graduate of Stanford Law School.

The article won the 24th Annual Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award, presented on June 4 at AAI’s 2026 Annual Policy Conference, Competition Policy, Journalism, and the Promotion of Truth Regarding Public Matters. The article provides the first large-scale analysis of interlocking directorates involving both public and private companies and finds 2,309 instances of individuals sitting on the boards of companies that are direct competitors. It meaningfully advances our understanding of the scope and competitive significance of interlocking boards, while proposing legal and structural reforms to address the problem.

Professor Noll and Professor Lemley discuss how the project grew out of earlier research on biotech company board interlocks (5:28); why many companies appear to have forgotten that interlocking directorates remain unlawful under Section 8 of the Clayton Act (7:49); whether the per se prohibition reflects outdated formalism or an important safeguard against softened competition and collusion (9:03); the role of investors, venture capitalists, and private equity representatives on competing company boards (10:39); the data the authors used to identify competitors and board relationships across the economy (18:19); the relationship between interlocking directorates and the common-ownership literature (23:43); whether interlocks may serve as a plus factor in proving collusion (27:22); and potential reforms, including stronger enforcement, board-disclosure obligations, and pre-clearance rules (29:29).

Antitrust scholarship that is considered and selected for the Jerry S. Cohen Award reflects a concern for principles of economic justice, the dispersal of economic power, the maintenance of effective limitations upon economic power, or the federal statutes designed to protect society from various forms of anticompetitive activity. Selected scholarship reflects an awareness of the human and social impacts of economic institutions upon individuals, small businesses and other institutions necessary to the maintenance of a just and humane society–values and concerns Jerry S. Cohen dedicated his life and work to fostering.

GUESTS:

Mark Lemley, William H. Neukom Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

Roger Noll, Professor of Economics Emeritus, Stanford University