The Open Markets Institute (OMI) announced the creation of a new academic advisory board to provide expertise for the DC think tank’s work in public policy. Among the 12 new board members is Professor Maurice Stucke, reported the UT Daily Beacon.
Stucke is the Douglas A. Blaze Distinguished Professor of Law at UT, where he teaches a variety of courses surrounding economics and law. He is also the co-author of several books, including “Big Data and Competition Policy” and the upcoming “Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us from Citizen Kings to Market Servants.”
Stucke recounted how he came to meet Barry Lynn, the executive director of OMI, at a conference hosted by the American Antitrust Institute (AAI).
“The AAI was unique because it felt like it was trying to preserve robust antitrust enforcement in this wave of retrenchment,” Stucke said. “Barry comes into this audience and says, ‘You know, you’re the culprits. You’re allowing antitrust to die,’ and everyone’s like, ‘no, no we’re the defenders!’ I then met Barry at that conference, and then we continued talking through that.”
OMI was formerly a program of the influential think tank New America until Lynn — then a senior fellow with the group — issued a statement praising the EU for levying an unprecedented US$2.7 billion fine against Google in 2017.
Before he was a professor at UT, Stucke served as a prosecutor for the Department of Justice. He explained how the department would predict whether a potential merger would significantly lessen competition.
“One of the problems is: we never really went back to check to see if we got our prediction right or wrong,” Stucke said. “The weather person would know if they got the prediction wrong — because it’s quite apparent if they said it was raining and the next day is sunny — but it’s harder to know to what extent the agencies are predicting it correctly,” Stucke said.
Full Content: U Daily Beacon
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