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What Happens When Every Firm Gets Better at Maximizing Profit?
What if every business told an AI one simple thing: **maximize long-term profit without breaking the law**?
A company today needs economists, salespeo…
2 weeks, 2 days ago
Two Vertical AI Deals
Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face. AMD is buying World Labs. Both deals represent moves by chip companies further up the AI stack, but the economics c…
2 weeks, 6 days ago
Cartels, Episode 5: If Everyone Can Confess First, Why Form a Cartel?
Leniency programs are supposed to destabilize cartels by rewarding the first participant who comes forward. But that creates an intriguing game-theor…
3 weeks ago
Two Vertical AI Deals — But Where Is the Antitrust Harm?
In this episode of EconWorks we look at two big AI acquisitions—AMD’s deal for World Labs and Nvidia’s deal for Hugging Face. In both cases, chip fir…
3 weeks, 1 day ago
How Cartels Really Work, Episode 5: The Race to Confess
A leniency program appears to generate a straightforward game theory problem for cartels. Suppose some firms agree to collude. Each wants to make car…
3 weeks, 2 days ago
Why NVIDIA Is Betting $13 Billion on Open AI Models
NVIDIA sells the computing power behind much of today’s AI boom. OpenAI and Anthropic are major sources of that demand. So why would NVIDIA spend nea…
3 weeks, 6 days ago
How Do You Enforce an Illegal Agreement?
Cartel members have a weird contracting problem: they can have a deal, but they can't rely on normal contract law to enforce it. This means cartels h…
4 weeks ago
Why NVIDIA Wants OpenAI to Have Competitors
NVIDIA sells the chips that companies like Anthropic and Open AI use. Now it is spending almost $13 billion to acquire Hugging Face, one of the most …
4 weeks, 1 day ago
How Do You Enforce an Illegal Agreement?
The problem with a cartel is that its agreement is illegal. If a member of a cartel cheats, the other members can’t simply sue in court and get a jud…
1 month ago
When Delivery Meets Cash-and-Carry
Sysco is planning to buy Jetro Restaurant Depot. But this is not a normal horizontal merger. Sysco delivers food to restaurants, mainly. Restaurant D…
1 month ago