Randy Picker
10.9K posts
Randy Picker
@randypicker
Student of antitrust, copyright, net industries. Views expressed here are not those of the University of Chicago (as if I needed to tell you that somehow).
Katılım Mart 2009
126 Takip Edilen4.7K Takipçiler
MacBook Neo is: A18 Pro chip, $599, four colors. A watershed event. First Mac with a mobile processor and the end of the disruptive arc of mobile computing. From Motorola to Intel to Apple silicon M, now personal computing is an accessory to mobile computing. A sharp punctuation point.
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New book showed up today (7th edition of the classic Hennessy and Patterson Computer Architecture book, now with Kozyrakis). The oxen/chicken question is fun, but I am most interested in the 2026 copyright notice:
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@Sherman1890 @HalSinger I was trying to just guess at what I think is probably going on. I will leave the world in which we have tailored pricing for plaintiff-side antitrust consultants to another day.
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Not sure how it took this long for me to experience the joys of dynamic garage pricing—I would only learn of the price upon exiting the garage—but now I feel like a real schmuck for driving the sports car and leaving the Jeep at home. Hope I paid extra for that!
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@Sherman1890 @HalSinger Do you really think they are doing this based on the type of car? My assumption would be that they know that they face different demand curves for parking at different times of day. The market clearing price at 10 AM might be quite different than it would be at 3 PM.
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@HalSinger Okay, so maybe new BMWs pay more than old Fords? It's also a repeated game, right? The gate closes behind me the first time, but I'll remember for the second time.
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@PGunigantiAT Do you have particular thoughts on them? Either here or via email if you prefer that?
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@randypicker Curious about how your class views the accuracy of factual claims in these.
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Happy New Year all. Classes start Monday. In my Winter tech policy seminar, we always read three new books. Here is the selection for this version:
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I have posted a pdf of my consolidated antitrust slides for the quarter. A very large file as I have a somewhat distinctive approach to slides: picker.uchicago.edu/antitrust/Pick…
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@stevesi Was no one at Microsoft was turning on a new Windows 7 PC in Europe to confirm that the browser choice screen was being presented to a new user? it seems that this should have been caught much much earlier on both sides. This was caught something like 17 months out?
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I am doing the new Meta opinion this afternoon in antitrust. Discovered this morning the new version from yesterday, with many fewer redactions. If you want a window into that, look at slides 59-71 in
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I will just say that I sent 680 pages on this subject (and more to be fair) to Princeton University Press last Tuesday. 550 pages of text, 130 pages of endnotes, 296K words total. Not even close to hitting the 300K word limit in the contract!
Brian Albrecht@BrianCAlbrecht
Semiconductors are clearly one of the most important industries in the world. They run everything: AI, cars, the digital economy. Yet people haven't focused on market competition in this industry. New paper out with @geoffmanne, David Teece, and @MZunigaP remedies that
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@florianederer @TomValletti Nope. Trumpet and violin as a kid. Kicked out a church choir in 3rd grade for bad singing. You all are on your own.
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@randypicker @TomValletti Randy, please tell us that you also play an instrument (ideally violin, viola or cello) so that we can have an antitrust musical trio.
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@florianederer @TomValletti I did not let the flute playing distract me from looking at the door frame and the ceiling. Wow.
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@florianederer I saw this on zoom a couple of weeks ago. I was quite impressed with your willingness to follow the facts. As I understood it, you are not really finding the digital killer acquisition results that you found for pharma before. That suggests an admirable level of openness.
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The paper, in contrast, was brand new:
florianederer.github.io/digital.pdf
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There are days when you realize how time flies. Today was one of those days.
I was back at MIT to present in the Organizational Economics Lunch ... 20 years after my very first presentation.
And Bengt Holmstrom, Bob Gibbons, Birger Wernerfelt and @DirkJenter were there too!🤯
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@Sherman1890 Well, I have a paper I am supposed to be finishing about all of that, but I also have a 10/31 manuscript deadline for my book. Hands full.
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@randypicker good question. Do you agree with Judge Mehta that right now there is so much uncertainty in search that a fairly limited remedy was in order?
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G-Search's market share has recently fallen about 5% and MSFT Bing's has risen about 3%. Anticipatory effects of the antitrust remedy? Or perhaps nothing whatsoever to do with antitrust? -- e.g., Bing's deployment of genAI may be more successful? gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-…
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I am sure that FTC commissioners are busy, but I do think they should devote a greater percentage of their time to ferreting out great deals on Diet Coke:
Mark Meador@MeadorFTC
I’ve noticed a concerning trend at my local grocery store: pricing that punishes low-volume shoppers. E.g.: Diet Coke is priced at $11.49 for a 12-pack. But if you buy 2, you get 3 free, which works out to $4.60 per 12-pack. Want just one, though? Sorry, it’s a 250% markup. Same thing with tortilla chips. $5.99/bag, or buy 2 and get 3 free ($2.40/bag).
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How is the answer to this question anything other than going from a four inch screen to a six inch screen.
Tyler Stalman@stalman
What was the single biggest feature upgrade to the iPhone ever? I’m going to say the ultra wide lens
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Joel David, The Aggregate Implications of Mergers and Acquisitions, 88 Rev. Econ Stud. 1796 (2021) (58k mergers down to Xaction size of $1m; synergy gains of roughly 14%). Albert Sheen, The Real Product Market Impact of Mergers, 69 J. Fin. 2651 (2014).
Randy Picker@randypicker
@Sherman1890 What are the leading retrospectives that you have in mind? One or two would be useful to have in hand, thanks.
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@Sherman1890 What are the leading retrospectives that you have in mind? One or two would be useful to have in hand, thanks.
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I've been looking at M&A retrospectives as opposed to the competition lit; M&A studies use larger samples examining the full range while the competition lit tends to look at mergers that trigger challenge. By a wide margin the M&A lit finds that efficiencies dominate.
Sandeep Vaheesan@sandeepvaheesan
While I am skeptical of the benefits of M&A in general, this would clearly be an efficiency-enhancing merger
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