Probability, Presumptions and Evidentiary Burdens in Antitrust Analysis: Revitalizing the Rule of Reason for Exclusionary Conduct

The conservative critique of antitrust law has been highly influential and has facilitated a transformation of antitrust standards of conduct since the 1970s and led to increasingly more permissive standards of conduct. While these changes have taken many forms, all were influenced by the view that competition law was over-deterrent. Critics relied heavily on the assumption that the durability and costs of false positive errors far exceeded those of false negatives. Many of the assumptions that guided this retrenchment of antitrust rules were mistaken and advances in the law and in economic analysis have rendered them anachronistic, particularly with respect to exclusionary conduct. Continued reliance on what are now exaggerated fears of “false positives,” and failure adequately to consider the harm from “false negatives,” has led courts to impose excessive demands of proof on plaintiffs that belie both established procedural norms and sound economic analysis. The result is not better and more reasonable antitrust standards, but instead an embedded ideological preference for non-intervention that creates a tendency toward false negatives, particularly in modern markets characterized by economies of scale and network effects. In this article, we explain how these erroneous assumptions about markets, institutions, and conduct have distorted the antitrust decision-making process and produced an excessive risk of false negatives in exclusionary conduct cases involving firms attempting to achieve, maintain, or enhance dominance or substantial market power. To redress this imbalance, we integrate modern economic analysis and the teaching of decision theory with the foundational conventions of antitrust law, which has long relied on probability, presumptions, and reasonable inferences to provide more effective means for evaluating competitive effects and resolving antitrust claims

Cognitive finance: Behavioural strategies of spending, saving, and investing.

Research in economics is increasingly open to empirical results. The advances in behavioural approaches are expanded here by applying cognitive methods to financial questions. The field of "cognitive finance" is approached by the exploration of decision strategies in the financial settings of spending, saving, and investing. Individual strategies in these different domains are searched for and elaborated to derive explanations for observed irregularities in financial decision making. Strong context-dependency and adaptive learning form the basis for this cognition-based approach to finance. Experiments, ratings, and real world data analysis are carried out in specific financial settings, combining different research methods to improve the understanding of natural financial behaviour. People use various strategies in the domains of spending, saving, and investing. Specific spending profiles can be elaborated for a better understanding of individual spending differences. It was found that people differ along four dimensions of spending, which can be labelled: General Leisure, Regular Maintenance, Risk Orientation, and Future Orientation. Saving behaviour is strongly dependent on how people mentally structure their finance and on their self-control attitude towards decision space restrictions, environmental cues, and contingency structures. Investment strategies depend on how companies, in which investments are placed, are evaluated on factors such as Honesty, Prestige, Innovation, and Power. Further on, different information integration strategies can be learned in decision situations with direct feedback. The mapping of cognitive processes in financial decision making is discussed and adaptive learning mechanisms are proposed for the observed behavioural differences. The construal of a "financial personality" is proposed in accordance with other dimensions of personality measures, to better acknowledge and predict variations in financial behaviour. This perspective enriches economic theories and provides a useful ground for improving individual financial services

Scientific Conventions, Ethics and Legal Institutions

This article examines the use of epidemiology to evaluate Risks posed by toxic substances. Using illustrations drawn from an elaborate example, it argues that scientists applying usual conventions in doing statistical studies tend to ignore important normative issues

The participation of Maltese older people in the voluntary sector

This publication is concerned with the interface between volunteerism and later life, with a special focus on the role that older adults can play in ensuring a better future for present and future generations. One of every four Maltese citizens is aged 60 and over, a state of affairs that will impact greatly on how local public policy is planned, coordinated and implemented. The ageing of Malta’s population warrants that government and civil society alike ceases to perceive older adults as a homogenous category, characterised by frailty and dependency, and instead, look at the immense opportunities that arise if older cohorts are mobilised into a productive force. In addition to active participation in the labour market, another highly promising area of policy development in productive ageing is volunteering. Indeed, all societies are experienced by a significant increase of people’s life- and healthexpectancies, so that a large percentage of older citizens enjoy some fifteen to twenty years of active retirement.peer-reviewe

Evidence-Based Health Care for Children: What Are We Missing?

Proposes a new framework for evaluating evidence in health care that takes into account interventions in child health promotion, which aim to change children's physical, social, or emotional environment and may take longer for the effects to show

Newsletter / House of Finance, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt 3/12

Parallel Banking – Frankfurt Can Bring some Light into the Darkness_3 THOMAS SCHÄFER Inflation and Growth: New Evidence from a Dynamic Panel Threshold Analysis_4 ALEXANDER BICK | STEPHANIE KREMER | DIETER NAUTZ Who Benefits from Building Insurance Groups?_6 SEBASTIAN SCHLÜTTER | HELMUT GRÜNDL IT Innovation: Mindfully Resisting the Bandwagon_8 ROMAN BECK | WOLFGANG KÖNIG | IMMANUEL PAHLKE | MARTIN WOLF “The Part-Time Master in Finance is GBS' Answer to the Bologna Process”_10 UWE WALZ House of Finance Wins New LOEWE Center_1

Spatial Externalities in Agriculture: Empirical Analysis, Statistical Identification, and Policy Implications

Spatial externalities can affect economic welfare and landscape pattern by linking farm returns on adjoining parcels of land. While policy can be informed by research that documents spatial externalities, statistically quantifying the presence of externalities from landscape pattern is insufficient for policy guidance unless the underlying cause of the externality can be identified as positive or negative. This article provides a springboard for empirical research by examining the underlying structure, social-environmental interactions, and statistical identification strategies for the analysis and quantification of agricultural spatial externalities that are derived from observations of landscape change. The potential for original policy treatments of agricultural spatial externalities in development and environment outcomes are highlighted.