Maurice Stucke, a University of Tennessee College of Law professor and a former trial attorney with the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division, recently spoke to Law360 about the tools antitrust agencies need to effectively probe big data. Stucke did the interview alongside his colleague, Allen P. Grunes, an antitrust lawyer who co-founded the Konkurrenz Group with Stucke.
In the interview, Stucke said that, “Agencies are a bit in a quandary. There are multiple challenges that big data raises for competition authorities. The current tools don’t work that well when assessing big data-driven mergers.”
It’s an argument that Stucke and Grunes elaborate on in Big Data and Competition Policy, a book published earlier this month by Oxford University Press.
“The existing models used by antitrust authorities to analyze the competitive effects of mergers do not match up well with the business models of those companies, leaving agencies in the dark,” the authors argue. “To close the gap … regulators will have to look beyond price comparisons and come up with new approaches and economic models to gain a more complete picture of how transactions fueled by big data will affect things like the quality of competition and innovation.”