Dynamic Competition in Digital Markets: A Critical Analysis of the House Judiciary Committee's Antitrust Report

13 Pages Posted: 27 Apr 2021

See all articles by Tracy Miller

Tracy Miller

Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Trace Mitchell

NetChoice; affiliation not provided to SSRN

Date Written: January 27, 2021

Abstract

This paper provides a critical analysis of the antitrust report from the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law of the House Committee on the Judiciary, based on the consumer welfare standard, which has governed antitrust policy since the late 1970s. It also proposes a theoretical framework for refutation of the report’s allegations about anticompetitive conduct of the big four tech companies that we hope will be useful for future empirical work. Using this framework, we find that the report likely overstates the market power held by these tech companies and the extent to which their conduct is actually harmful to consumers. In addition, our framework leads us to hypothesize that the reforms advocated in the report may actually make consumers worse off by interfering with market dynamism and slowing innovation.

Keywords: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, digital markets, anti-trust, competition, consumer welfare standard

JEL Classification: K21, L40, O00, O31

Suggested Citation

Miller, Tracy and Mitchell, Trace and Mitchell, Trace, Dynamic Competition in Digital Markets: A Critical Analysis of the House Judiciary Committee's Antitrust Report (January 27, 2021). Mercatus Policy Brief Series, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3834473 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3834473

Tracy Miller (Contact Author)

Mercatus Center at George Mason University ( email )

3434 Washington Blvd., 4th Floor
Arlington, VA 22201
United States

Trace Mitchell

affiliation not provided to SSRN

NetChoice ( email )

WA 20005
United States

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