United States v. Microsoft Corporation, 253 F.3d 34, was a landmark American antitrust law case at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the personal computer (PC) market, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.
In economics, industrial organization is a field that builds on the theory of the firm by examining the structure of firms and markets. Industrial organization adds real-world complications to the perfectly competitive model, complications such as transaction costs, limited information, and barriers to entry of new firms that may be associated with imperfect competition. It analyzes determinants of firm and market organization and behavior on a continuum between competition and monopoly, including from government actions.
Franco Modigliani was an Italian-American economist and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT Sloan School of Management.
Collusion is a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation between two or more parties to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading or defrauding others of their legal right. Collusion is not always considered illegal. It can be used to attain objectives forbidden by law; for example, by defrauding or gaining an unfair market advantage. It is an agreement among firms or individuals to divide a market, set prices, limit production or limit opportunities. It can involve "unions, wage fixing, kickbacks, or misrepresenting the independence of the relationship between the colluding parties". In legal terms, all acts effected by collusion are considered void.
The Herfindahl index is a measure of the size of firms in relation to the industry they are in and is an indicator of the amount of competition among them. Named after economists Orris C. Herfindahl and Albert O. Hirschman, it is an economic concept widely applied in competition law, antitrust regulation, and technology management. HHI has continued to be used by antitrust authorities, primarily to evaluate and understand how mergers will affect their associated markets. HHI is calculated by squaring the market share of each competing firm in the industry—expressed as either fractions, decimals, or whole numbers—and then summing the resulting numbers. The result is proportional to the average market share, weighted by market share. As such, it can range from 0 to 1.0, moving from a huge number of very small firms to a single monopolistic producer. Increases in the HHI generally indicate a decrease in competition and an increase of market power, whereas decreases indicate the opposite. Alternatively, if whole percentages are used, the index ranges from 0 to 10,000 "points". For example, an index of .25 is the same as 2,500 points.
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust law, anti-monopoly law, and trade practices law; the act of pushing for antitrust measures or attacking monopolistic companies is commonly known as trust busting.
Maurice Raymond “Hank” Greenberg is an American business executive and former chairman and chief executive officer of American International Group (AIG).
Richard Lee "Dick" Schmalensee is the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management, Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the Department of Economics at MIT. He served as the John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management from 1998 through 2007. He was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 through 1991 and served for 12 years as Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.
Barry J. Nalebuff is an American businessman, business theorist, and writer. He is a Milton Steinbach Professor of Management at Yale School of Management and author who specializes in business strategy and game theory. His published books include Thinking Strategically and The Art of Strategy. Nalebuff's class on negotiation has over 67,000 active learners through Coursera and has the second-highest net promoter score on the platform. He has a semi-regular column in Forbes with Ian Ayres called "Why Not?"
In economics, market concentration is a function of the number of firms and their respective shares of the total production in a market. In any industry, a handful of firms that hold a significant portion of the market share and likely engage in the practice of consolidation will indicate higher market concentration within that industry. The market concentration ratio measures the concentration of the top firms in the market, this can be through various metrics such as sales, employment numbers, active users or other relevant indicators. In theory and in practice, market concentration is closely associated with market competitiveness, and therefore is important to various antitrust agencies when considering proposed mergers and other regulatory issues. Market concentration is important in determining firm market power in setting prices and quantities.
Microsoft Corp. v. Commission is a case brought by the European Commission of the European Union (EU) against Microsoft for abuse of its dominant position in the market. It started as a complaint from Sun Microsystems over Microsoft's licensing practices in 1993, and eventually resulted in the EU ordering Microsoft to divulge certain information about its server products and release a version of Microsoft Windows without Windows Media Player. The European Commission especially focused on the interoperability issue.
Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World's Most Dynamic Companies is a book by Market Platform Dynamics founder David S. Evans and MIT economist Richard L. Schmalensee published in 2007.
Competition law theory covers the strands of thought relating to competition law or antitrust policy.
Paul Lewis Joskow is an American economist and professor. He became President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on January 1, 2008. He is also the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics, Emeritus at MIT. He has served on the MIT faculty since 1972. From 1994 through 1998 he was Head of the MIT Department of Economics. From 1999 through 2007 he was the Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Since rejoining in 2018 from his 1988-2007 term, Professor Joskow is Research Associate on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
A patent thicket is "an overlapping set of patent rights" which requires innovators to reach licensing deals for multiple patents. This concept is associated with negative connotations and has been described as "a dense web of overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its way through in order to actually commercialize new technology".
Jane Willis, a partner at Ropes & Gray, served as co-head of the Litigation and Enforcement practice, and then became a member of the firm's Policy Committee in 2019. She is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University in Applied Mathematics in 1991, and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994. In school, she had a reputation as a mathematical whiz, and was recruited into the MIT Blackjack Team. The book Bringing Down the House and the film 21 are based upon the team's success. Willis is portrayed as a character named "Jill" in both the book and film.
Franklin Marvin Fisher was an American economist. He taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960 to 2004.
Philippe Mario Aghion FBA is a French economist who is a professor at College de France, at INSEAD, and at the London School of Economics. He is also teaching at the Paris School of Economics. Philippe Aghion was formerly the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Prior to that, he was a professor at University College London, an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Donald Frank Turner was an American antitrust attorney, economist, legal scholar and educator who spent most of his career teaching at Harvard Law School. He was also Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division from 1965-68.
Geoffrey G Parker is a scholar whose work focuses on distributed innovation, energy markets, and the economics of information. He co-developed the theory of two-sided markets with Marshall Van Alstyne.
