Mr. Tirole’s work “successfully challenged” this view, the Nobel Prize committee said on Monday. He brought together evidence that such deals could have negative consequences and articulated a unifying theory that has proved influential. “So now, when there is a major merger that involves important vertical relationships, the authorities take a more nuanced view,” said Mr. White, who served as chief economist of the antitrust division of the Justice Department in the early 1980s. “And we have Tirole in part to thank.” Mr. White said a recent example came in 2011, when the government conditioned Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal on the terms of a deal that made NBCUniversal’s content available to Comcast’s rivals. Continue reading the main story RECENT COMMENTS Marjorie Kolbmann 4 hours ago Economics that gives optimistic, workable solutions for the common good of all. Keep up the good work. Gene Thompson 5 hours ago I am adding my applause for both Piketty and Jean Tirole as Nobel Prize winners.And, for a redistribution of wealth to occur, it will have... A.G. Alias 5 hours ago In theory … competition keeps prices low and quality high. In reality, monopolies … dominate many markets. They … keep prices artificially... SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT Mr. Tirole’s work also served as the basis for the European Union’s regulation of credit card interchange fees, and it has informed investigations by European regulators of the pricing policies of technology companies. “We owe Jean Tirole so much,” Joaquín Almunia, the European Commission official responsible for competition, said in a statement Monday. Mr. Almunia has pressed investigations of Google’s market power and of bank pricing practices. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Mr. Tirole, however, has not always been an advocate of regulation. When Washington sued Visa and MasterCard in 1998 for preventing banks from issuing American Express cards, the companies cited Mr. Tirole’s work as showing that such membership rules were beneficial. More recently he has defended “patent pools,” where owners of related patents bundle their work. Mr. Tirole received a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, and he taught at M.I.T. for eight years before returning to France in the early 1990s. The economics school at Toulouse, which he helped found, is now a leading center for the study of regulation.He was far ahead of most economists in advocating for increased financial regulation, including early work supporting easy access to funding for financial institutions during crises.In an interview broadcast Monday during the awards announcement, Mr. Tirole applauded recent efforts to impose liquidity regulations on financial companies, but warned that “banking is a very hard thing to regulate.”Mr. Tirole said regulators needed to pay attention to the linkages between regulated financial firms like banks and unregulated financial companies. “That is something we had forgotten or ignored before the crisis,” he said.Mr. Tirole also said that a more “global stance” was needed to regulate industries that increasingly operate around the world, including actions to limit climate change. nytimes/2014/10/14/business/jean-tirole-wins-nobel-prize-in-economics.html?emc=edit_th_20141014&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=26262140&_r=0
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:25:31 +0000