Economy

Consumer protection often begins with a simple question: Can the consumer walk away? If the answer is no—because switching is hard, data are locked up, markets are fragmented, or new …

Meta’s Incognito Chat is interesting not because it promises privacy, but because it makes privacy expensive. It limits what Meta can know, what Meta can monetize, and what Meta can …

If you have been near anyone under the age of 15 in the past year, you may have heard the phrase “six seven” shouted with great conviction and no discernible …

The traditional domain of law & economics is the courtroom, the legislature, and the administrative agency. But in their 1994 article, “Raid or Trade? An Economic Model of Indian-White Relations,” …

Catherine Sharkey’s “Punitive Damages as Societal Damages” addresses a tension that has been obvious for decades, but usually treated as an annoyance: punitive damages are justified in public-regarding terms—punishment, deterrence, …

There’s a popular argument that AI will do to human workers what tractors did to horses. Tractors could do what horses did. Horses became obsolete. AI can do what humans …

A lawsuit over infinite scroll sounds, at first blush, like a fight over product design. Make the app less sticky. Stop nudging teens to keep scrolling. Turn down the algorithmic …

In a recent Substack essay, “The progress movement needs a better theory of progress,” Brink Lindsey argues that the progress movement has settled for too thin a vision. It focuses …

Spirit Airlines built its brand on the promise that flying could be miserable, but cheap. Its reported shutdown and liquidation now poses a less cheerful question for antitrust: What if …

A drug manufacturer’s research pipeline is many things: a bet on science, a bet on regulators, a bet on patents, and a very expensive bet against failure. What it has …