A Comparison of the HHI and the Procurement-Based Framework in Merger Review
by Kenneth Gong Abstract The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a measure of market concentration, plays a critical role in the U.S. Merger Guidelines. It is used as a threshold metric that marks certain mergers as potentially harmful to consumers. However, the microfoundations for the HHI are grounded in the Cournot oligopoly model, which may not be […]
Beyond the But-For World: Weak-necessity causal reasoning for model-based counterfactuals in law and economics
by Lilia Qian Abstract Under current standards for scientific evidence defined under Daubert, antitrust models are frequently excluded from legal consideration, but not always for reasons that make them genuinely unreliable. This paper clarifies why antitrust models face difficulties when subjected to methodological scrutiny: the employment of model-based counterfactual arguments under an epistemically defective ‘but-for’ […]
The Determination of Newspaper Slant in Small Markets
By Jordyn Gracey This paper takes the assertion, made by Gentzkow et al., that newspaper slant is primarily determined by slant as given. Both that paper and this one use Hotelling as a foundation. However, this paper considers what happens when the distribution of ideological preferences differs at national and county levels. This paper controls […]
