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Brian Albrecht Profile picture
Brian Albrecht
@BrianCAlbrecht
Chief Economist @LawEconCenter. Antitrust and price theory. 📝Price Theory Newsletter https://t.co/1S7TB6ANUP
3 subscribers
Oct 30 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
🚨 Updated paper alert 🚨

"Market microstructure and informational complexity" with @GuthmannR

Why do we have organized markets with intermediaries like NYSE or Amazon?

Our answer: they drastically reduce the information burden on everyone else.

Here's how we get there 🧵 Image Hayek taught us markets require minimal information. Traders only need to know prices, not everyone's preferences or endowments.

This generated formal proofs, particularly from Jordan (1982)

The competitive market is uniquely informationally efficient, or minimally complex. Image
Oct 22 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Two macro trends over 40 years:

- Rising markups
- Falling business dynamism

Are these related? Many economists say so.

@UpdatedPriors and I have an updated paper where we take an IO approach and look sector by sector.

Spoiler: The industry data tells a different story 🧵 Image
Image The economic logic makes some sense:

Higher markups → firms have market power → barriers keep out competitors → less entry/dynamism

This story is so widely accepted. It's in the background of all antitrust discourse.

But what happens when we test it at the industry level?
Oct 15 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
Anthropic just released policy proposals.

There are actively bad ideas, generally good but unrelated to AI, and others that miss the forest for the trees.

I read the overarching framing as "how do we minimize harm?" not "how do we harness benefits and navigate trade-offs?" AI is bad, so tax it! Okay?

It's not exactly clear what the externality is, but we don't just tax everything an some economist calls an externality. Image
Oct 13 • 33 tweets • 10 min read
🚨 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics goes to Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt 🚨

"for having explained innovation-driven economic growht"

The best prize in years! Image For most of human history, living standards barely changed. Then something shifted.

This is THE question. The hockey stick. Why did it happen? What happened?

Modern economics get critiqued for being meaursable stuff that doesn't matter. Not these guys
Oct 10 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Matthew Lynn's WaPo piece claims economists were wrong about tariffs. Economists are a diverse group so you can definitely find mistakes.

But overall it's a bad piece.

Cherry-picking data, timeline confusion, and misunderstanding basic tax data and incidence. Image It's a bit of shadowboxing against I'm not sure who.

2 private economists who made predictions mid-April?

Okay. Lynn says "six months on" as if tariffs have been stable since April, so these are the right predictions to judge. Image
Sep 3 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
The Google Search remedies decision just dropped. The court rejected breakups, payment bans, and choice screens.

But it still ordered data sharing and syndication duties.

This reasoning will shape antitrust for years. My thoughts 🧵 First, what the court actually ordered:

- No exclusive contracts for Search/Chrome/Assistant/Gemini
- Must share some search index metadata (one-time)
- Must offer syndication to rivals
- 6-year term

What it DIDN'T order matters just as much.
Aug 12 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
🧵 of EJ Antoni completely not understanding economic statistics, being partisan hack, or both x.com/garywinslett/s… x.com/garywinslett/s…
Aug 9 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The first statement is true for any particular tax.

But it tells us nothing about comparisons across taxes. You can’t compare so easily.

Two simple examples to see why: Image Suppose a good is in fixed supply (perfectly inelastic). Increasing that tax generates no deadweight loss.

Are you going to compare to another tax?

Lesson 1: Elasticities matter still.
Aug 5 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Planet Money had an interesting podcast tying together the BLS story with the broader questions about the role of economists and economics.

Some thoughts:
npr.org/2025/08/01/125… I think there's just a huge disagreement about what economists do. Everyone seems to want pure prediction.

There's the usual stuff about not predicting the Great Recession and Financial Crisis. I'm left wondering, compared to who? Which group of people saw it coming?
Jul 29 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Highly misleading data from Lina Khan. This is all about new businesses, not small businesses.

Those new, growing businesses that will end up making jobs and innovations are not filing RPA lawsuits. They aren't doing anything on "more local control." Image The thing about small businesses is... They suck, in terms of job creation, productivity, etc.

The only good ones are a very few of the new ones.

And those ones don't stay small for long! Then they become big and then Khan would try to kill them
Jul 22 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Michael Pettis, again in FT, ignoring how prices adjust.

Pro-tip: Write down a model. Check your equilibrium conditions. 🧵 of what happens when you don't Image Don't be confused by the currency/captial/trade stuff. What is he actually saying?

"country’s investment is constrained not by scarce saving but rather by inadequate domestic demand"

He is saying quantity is constrained, not by supply, but by demand. It's both! Image
Apr 29 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
The next stage of the Google AdTech case is remedies, with a hearing this Friday and initial proposals due May 5.

September 22nd is the other date to remember.

A little background as we move into this next stage. Image The liability phase is in the books.

Judge Brinkema found Google monopolized the open-web publisher ad-server market (DFP) and the ad-exchange market (AdX), plus an unlawful tying of the two products. Count III (advertiser networks) was tossed. static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/d…
Apr 17 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Cracking open the 115‑page ruling.

Going in, two Supreme‑Court cases oomed large:

- Trinko (refusal‑to‑deal) and
- AmEx (two‑sided platforms)

I want to focus on those in this first pass 🧵 Judge says: Google’s sin is tying customers, not refusing rivals—so Trinko safe‑harbor ≠ available. Image
Apr 16 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The FTC's trial against Meta is underway.

So far, it seems the FTC (and Zuckerberg in 2012) fundamentally misunderstands network effects and how they interact with competition.

A short thread on the economics of network effects as relevant to this case: Image First, network *effects* are not inherently anti-competitive or bad.

That could just mean that the value to users grows as more users sign up. Then we want more users to sign up!

I explained this in a 2-pager about scale. But just read "network" laweconcenter.org/resources/scal…
Mar 31 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I appreciate that WSJ publishes opposing views.

But this tariff piece just demonstrates how weak these arguments are. Just a string of vague statements and non-sequiturs. Image Again, we see that claim about high tariffs and the 19th century. Any argument provided? Nop.e

It's not explicitly saying causation, but just hitting at it. Image
Mar 7 • 74 tweets • 9 min read
I’ll be live tweeting this (once we get to economics) Image Here’s what we have coming up: 90 minutes from each side presenting on the economics, trying to expand on written submissions.

The goal is to flesh out the key differences between the two parties
Feb 18 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Let's put aside the intra-FTC tensions here.

Commissioner Bedoya argues the FTC should study the egg supply chain. That's fair.

But the market dynamics look more consistent with competitive supply and demand than market manipulation. A key economic idea: A small supply drop (4%) can generate large price changes when short-run supply is highly inelastic.

With egg production, supply is essentially vertical in the short run due to chicken lifecycles.
Feb 5 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The DOJ won their case against Google Search. Now what?

This important RCT on Google Search users gives some clue into the possible outcomes. My reading is that it's not good for feasible remedies.

Let me explain. First, everyone's favorite remedy: choice screens. Let's assume its not even mandated to avoid the legal issues.

The study shows making users actively choose between search engines only increases Bing's share by 1.1 percentage points.

Not promising!
Feb 4 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This oped from Lina Khan is completely wrong on competition in general.

Somehow, its even worse on the unique AI aspects.

The story isn't about lack of competition - it's about how competition in tech markets actually works. Image Khan sees DeepSeek as evidence that big tech is failing to innovate.

But the newsworthy thing about DeepSeek is how it shows that even massive incumbents can't rest on their laurels in AI. It made news when it destroyed Nvidia's stock. nytimes.com/2025/02/04/opi…
Jan 23 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Last week, I was able to chat with Oliver Hart at our @LawEconCenter event, "Substance over Slogans."

The focus was on contracts, the nature of the firm, and what his research means for antitrust. I was especially excited about his more recent work.

Here's what I learned: Image Hart's Nobel-winning research started with a basic but profound question:

Why would one firm buy another rather than just contract with them?

It's abstract but at the core of how we think about antitrust policy. If contracting works well, why do we see mergers?
Jan 17 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The FTC's mad dash to file cases before the administration change continues.

This time it's Pepsi for... *checks notes*... giving volume discounts to big retailers? 🤔

The Robinson-Patman lunacy continues... Image A 3-2 Commission vote, rushed through in the final days, with both Republican commissioners dissenting. Not exactly a model of careful enforcement.

For context, this is the FTC's second RPA case in a month after a hiatus.