Ruled by Reason

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...

In this episode of Ruled by Reason , AAI Vice President and Director of Legal Advocacy Kathleen Bradish talks with Ron Schnell, a computer scientist, startup entrepreneur, and former general manager of the Technical Committee created to monitor Microsoft's compliance with the U.S. v. Microsoft consent decrees. Their conversation explores what the antitrust bar still hasn't fully absorbed from one...

In this episode of   Ruled by Reason , AAI VP and Director of Legal Advocacy Kathleen Bradish speaks with Professor Jennifer Sturiale about how her recent work attempts to address the persistent gap between public concern over monopolies and the limits of current Section 2 enforcement. Sturiale notes at the outset that her work originates in a fundament, ongoing issue: while antitrust law is, by i...

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President Randy Stutz talks with antitrust thought leader Michael Kades about the latest developments at the intersection of federal, state and private antitrust enforcement. The conversation begins with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of federal, state and private enforcers in the current enforcement climate (5:11). It then moves to the promise...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI Senior Counsel David O. Fisher talks with leading economist Ioana Marinescu about the theoretical frameworks underpinning labor monopsony and how they apply in various antitrust law and policy contexts. The conversation centers on Marinescu's recent paper with coauthor José Azar, Monopsony Power in the Labor Market: From Theory to Policy , which lays out the...

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, guest host John B. "Jack" Kirkwood , Professor of Law and the William C. Oltman Professor of Teaching Excellence at Seattle University School of Law, sits down with Daniel Francis , Assistant Professor of Law at NYU Law School. The two discuss Francis's award-winning article, Monopolizing by Conditioning , 124 Colum. L. Rev. 1917 (2024) . Professor Francis's art...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI Senior Counsel David O. Fisher chats with legal scholar Giovanna Massarotto about what antitrust law can learn from computer science, and particularly how understanding agreement algorithms can help courts and enforcers police algorithmic price-fixing and other illegal agreements under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.   The conversation centers on Massarotto's...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI Senior Counsel David O. Fisher chats with economist Edoardo Peruzzi and antitrust scholar Christine Bartholomew about the role of Daubert challenges in antitrust suits, focusing on the increasing role of Daubert as a gatekeeping device that may be hindering private antitrust enforcement. The conversation begins with an examination of Peruzzi's recent working...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, Emily Bridges of the Food and Agriculture Impact Project has a wide-ranging discussion with antitrust scholar Peter Carstensen about the role of information exchange in restricting competition in agricultural markets, focusing on how the DOJ's case against Agri-Stats addresses that threat. After covering the oligopolistic nature of many agricultural markets (2:4...

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President Randy Stutz sits down with Andy Green, the Senior Advisor for Fair and Competitive Markets at the U.S. Department of Agriculture . The two discuss how Green found his way to the USDA after beginning his career as a corporate securities lawyer and developing policy expertise in the financial sector (2:46), the new role created for a competition advi...

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, guest host Leslie Marx , the Robert A. Bandeen Distinguished Professor of Economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, sits down with Professor Florian Ederer to discuss his award-winning article, Common Ownership, Competition, and Top Management Incentives , 131 J. Pol. Econ 1294 (2023) . Professor Ederer is the Allen and Kelli Questrom Professor in...

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI goes international! Enforcers from the U.S., New Zealand, UK and Chile talk with Kathleen Bradish, Vice President and Director of Legal Advocacy, about their agencies' cross-border work to stop price-fixing cartels. Leah McCoy, Juan Correa, Louise Baner, and Grant Chamberlain, whose agencies are heading up the International Competition Network's Cartel Worki...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, we explore the ramifications of the Google search case from a unique perspective—the rival search engines that have been directly affected by Google's alleged monopolistic conduct. As the antitrust world eagerly awaits a decision this spring, AAI's Kathleen Bradish interviews DuckDuckGo's Kamyl Bazbaz, VP of Communications and Public Affairs, about his impressio...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI's Kathleen Bradish talks with Open Market's Sandeep Vaheesan and the American Economic Liberties Project's Erik Peinert about the pro-enforcement community's views on the draft Merger Guidelines recently released by the FTC and DOJ. This is a wide-ranging and in-depth discussion about how the proposed changes succeed in advancing better merger enforcement, w...

In this episode of Ruled by Reason, guest host Roger Noll, Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Stanford University and AAI Advisor sits down with Erik Hovenkamp to chat about his award-winning article  The Antitrust Duty to Deal in the Age of Big Tech " (131 Yale L.J. 1483 (2022)). Professor Hovenkamp is Assistant Professor at the USC Gould School of Law. His article argues that the law on exclus...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President, Diana Moss, and AAI Vice President for Legal Advocacy, Kathleen Bradish talk with leadership at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division about the newly released merger guidelines. Moss and Bradish are joined by Susan Athey, Chief Economist for the Antitrust Division and Michael Kades, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President, Diana Moss, and AAI Vice President for Legal Advocacy, Kathleen Bradish talk about competition and cloud technology markets. AAI recently issued the report: The Cloud Technology Market: Storm of Innovation or Rainy Days for Competition? Moss and Bradish unpack AAI's analysis of a vitally important market in the digital economy, beginning with the...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI Vice President for Legal Advocacy Kathleen Bradish hosts J. Wyatt Fore and David Golden of Constantine Canon to discuss their work in private antitrust enforcement under the Shipping Act. They explain how consolidation in the shipping industry has led to a serious competition problem, one that came into full view when COVID-19 exposed a dangerous lack of res...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President Diana Moss hosts two leading healthcare competition experts. Laura Alexander is Director of Markets and Competition Policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and Brent Fulton is Associate Research Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Associate Director of the Petris Center on Health Car...

On this episode of Ruled by Reason, AAI President Diana Moss hosts David Smith, CEO of Associated Wholesale Grocers, and Chris Jones, SVP of Government Relations and Counsel for the National Grocers Association. They take up a front-line issue: consolidation in the retail grocery supply chain and the threat it poses to smaller independent grocers. The accumulation of market power has spurred an on...

In this podcast episode, AAI President Diana Moss sits down with two airline pilots, Kelly Ison and Eric McEldowney, to talk about the effect of airline consolidation on labor workforces. There have been almost 20 airline mergers involving U.S. carriers in the last two decades, six of which have involved mergers of major legacy and low-cost carriers. Today, the sector is dominated by a tight oligo...

In this podcast episode, AAI President Diana Moss and Steven Salop, Professor Emeritus at Georgetown Law, take stock of the Biden antitrust agencies' merger enforcement record. The antitrust chiefs at the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division were chosen specifically for their commitment to invigorating antitrust enforcement. As we head into the third year of t...

In this podcast episode, AAI's former Vice President of Legal Advocacy Randy Stutz talks with Howard Law Professor Andy Gavil and George Washington Law Professor Bill Kovacic about institutional dynamics that can affect efforts to shift policy and initiate reform from within the federal antitrust agencies. The three discuss lessons from previous efforts to implement significant policy reforms in t...

On this 25 th podcast episode, AAI President Diana Moss and enforcement experts, Stephen Calkins and Benjamin Elga, unpack antitrust enforcement in markets that raise issues around social well-being, human health, and vulnerable consumers and workers. Antitrust is designed to deter and remediate harmful, anticompetitive mergers and conduct while remaining "agnostic" to the markets in which competi...

In this episode, former AAI Vice President of Policy Laura Alexander discusses the concept of countervailing power and the controversial role in plays in antitrust and competition law with NYU Associate Professor Daniel Francis, one of the leading voices on this subject. The idea that otherwise unlawful cartels, mergers, and collaborations should be allowed between companies facing a monopolists o...