US Government Antitrust Intervention in Standard-Setting Activities and the Competitive Process

The private sector historically has driven the setting of technical standards in the United States, with the federal government only intervening in response to perceived violations of specific statutes, such as antitrust laws. This concern is reflected in case law and in advice proffered by US antitrust enforcers. Recently, however, US enforcers have turned their attention primarily to the alleged misuse of monopoly power over patents that cover technologies embodied in standards. This new focus threatens to undermine innovation and departs from sound antitrust enforcement policy. American antitrust enforcers should redirect their priorities away from alleged single-firm, patent-related abuses associated with standard setting and toward the traditional emphasis on reductions in rivalrous competition. They should also reject their recently adopted skeptical attitude toward patents and return to the former consensus, understanding that the exercise of patent rights generally promotes innovation and strengthens the competitive process

Titelund Inhalt von: Dynamik der synanthropen Vegetation. Festschrift für Prof. Dr. Dietmar Brandes

In his seminal 1984 article, The Limits of Antitrust, Judge Frank Easterbrook proposed that courts and enforcers adopt a simple set of screening rules for application in antitrust cases, in order to minimize error and decision costs and thereby maximize antitrust\u27s social value. Over time, federal courts in general, and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular, under Chief Justice Roberts have in substantial part adopted Easterbrook\u27s limits of antitrust approach, thereby helping to reduce costly antitrust uncertainty. Recently, however, antitrust enforcers in the Obama Administration (unlike their predecessors in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Administrations) have been less attuned to this approach, and have undertaken initiatives that reduce clarity and predictability in antitrust enforcement. Regardless of the cause of the diverging stances on the limits of antitrust, two things are clear. First, recent enforcement agency policies are severely at odds with the philosophy that informs Supreme Court antitrust jurisprudence. Second, if the agencies do not reverse course, acknowledge antitrust\u27s limits, and seek to optimize the law in light of those limits, consumers will suffer

Governing the Global Land Grab: Multipolarity, Ideas and Complexity in Transnational Governance

Since 2008, a series of new regulatory initiatives have emerged to address large-scale land grabs. These initiatives are occurring simultaneously at multiple levels of social organization instead of a single, overarching institutional site. A significant portion of this activity is taking place at the transnational level. We suggest that transnational land governance is indicative of emerging shifts in the practice of governance of global affairs. We analyze such shifts by asking two related questions: what does land grabbing tell us about developments in transnational governance, particularly with regard to North-South relations, and what do these developments in transnational governance mean for regulating land grabbing?Desde 2008, ha surgido una serie de nuevas iniciativas regulatorias para tratar acaparamientos de tierra a gran escala. Estas iniciativas están sucediendo simultáneamente a niveles múltiples de la organización social en vez de un lugar institucional predominante. Una porción importante de esta actividad está tomando lugar al nivel transnacional. Sugerimos que la gobernanza de tierras trasnacionales es indicativa de los cambios que están surgiendo en la práctica de gobernanza de los asuntos globales. Analizamos tales cambios haciendo dos preguntas relacionadas: ¿qué nos dice el acaparamiento de tierras sobre los desarrollos en la gobernanza trasnacional, particularmente con las relaciones norte-sur?, y ¿qué significan estos desarrollos en gobernanza trasnacional para regular el acaparamiento de tierras

Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States

Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models provide specific, quantitative, and evaluable predictions that inform short-term decisions such as healthcare staffing needs, school closures, and allocation of medical supplies. Starting in April 2020, the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub (https://covid19forecasthub.org/) collected, disseminated, and synthesized tens of millions of specific predictions from more than 90 different academic, industry, and independent research groups. A multimodel ensemble forecast that combined predictions from dozens of groups every week provided the most consistently accurate probabilistic forecasts of incident deaths due to COVID-19 at the state and national level from April 2020 through October 2021. The performance of 27 individual models that submitted complete forecasts of COVID-19 deaths consistently throughout this year showed high variability in forecast skill across time, geospatial units, and forecast horizons. Two-thirds of the models evaluated showed better accuracy than a naïve baseline model. Forecast accuracy degraded as models made predictions further into the future, with probabilistic error at a 20-wk horizon three to five times larger than when predicting at a 1-wk horizon. This project underscores the role that collaboration and active coordination between governmental public-health agencies, academic modeling teams, and industry partners can play in developing modern modeling capabilities to support local, state, and federal response to outbreaks