Friday, January 26, 2024

The DOJ on competition for workers

 A lot of market design is done by regulators, and some of that is done to enforce existing laws.  Here's a report from the Department of Justice, focusing on four cases involving payment to workers (including authors of books).

Athey, Susan, Mark Chicu, Malika Krishna, and Ioana Marinescu. "The Year in Review: Economics at the Antitrust Division, 2022–2023." Review of Industrial Organization (2024): 1-20.

"In this review article, we report on five enforcement matters that expanded the scope of enforcement by the Division. The first four enforcement matters highlight a number of the Division’s actions to protect labor market competition in criminal and civil merger and non-merger cases. These include: criminal enforcement against a provider of contract health care staffing services that allocated nurse employees through a no-poaching agreement and agreed to fix the wages of those nurses; civil enforcement to stop an e-Sports league from effectively imposing a salary cap on its players; civil enforcement to stop a conspiracy among poultry processors to share information about worker compensation; and the successful challenge of a merger between two of the largest book publishers in the U.S., which preserved competition for books that will benefit authors."

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