Antitrust Brainstorm Board with Elyse Dorsey

Below, we have provided the full transcript of the interview with Elyse Dorsey, Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia, recorded on September 3, 2021.

This interview was done as part of the Antitrust Brainstorming Board created by CPI with the support of the CCIA.

Thank you, Ms. Dorsey, for sharing your time for this interview with CPI.

A video of the complete interview is available HERE.

Do you think the current antitrust framework works for consumers?

Elyse DORSEY:

So I think that’s a really great question to kick things off today. There are so many different values and benefits that are kind of competing for airtime in the popular antitrust discussion today, but at the forefront of the concern with antitrust law in the modern era and as it stands today is really consumers. The Consumer Welfare Standard puts the consumer front and center and it’s really a robust and pretty flexible system that provides this powerful and really concentrated lens through which we can analyze how various conduct or behavior affects consumers. And we’ve seen it, we’ve watched it adapt to changes in how firms compete over time. For example, while price is often a very important component of how firms compete, we see time and time again today that that’s not the only one and it might not even be a very important one in different markets.

What the Consumer Welfare Standard allows us to do though is really, to your question, put the consumer first and sa