Antitrust Law in the New Economy: Google, Yelp, LIBOR,
and the Control of Information
by Mark R. Patterson (Author)
Markets run on information. Buyers make decisions by
relying on their knowledge of the products available, and sellers decide what
to produce based on their understanding of what buyers want. But the
distribution of market information has changed, as consumers increasingly turn
to sources that act as intermediaries for information―companies like Yelp and
Google. Antitrust Law in the New Economy considers a wide range of problems
that arise around one aspect of information in the marketplace: its quality.
Sellers now have the ability and motivation to distort
the truth about their products when they make data available to intermediaries.
And intermediaries, in turn, have their own incentives to skew the facts they
provide to buyers, both to benefit advertisers and to gain advantages over
their competition. Consumer protection law is poorly suited for these problems
in the information economy. Antitrust law, designed to regulate powerful firms
and prevent collusion among producers, is a better choice. But the current
application of antitrust law pays little attention to information quality.
Mark Patterson discusses a range of ways in which data
can be manipulated for competitive advantage and exploitation of consumers (as
happened in the LIBOR scandal), and he considers novel issues like
“confusopoly” and sellers’ use of consumers’ personal information in direct
selling. Antitrust law can and should be adapted for the information economy,
Patterson argues, and he shows how courts can apply antitrust to address
today’s problems.
