[event] Richard S. Markovits: The Impact of Mergers on R&D
June 17 12:00 UTC+1
Organizer: Thibault Schrepel, Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (ALTI).
Speaker: Richard Markovits teaches and writes in the areas of antitrust, law and economics, constitutional law and jurisprudence. He is the author of articles in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and elsewhere as well as the book Matters of Principle: Legitimate Legal Argument and Constitutional Interpretation (NYU, 1998), Truth or Economics: On the Definition, Prediction, and Relevance of Economic Efficiency (Yale, 2008), and Economics and the Interpretation and Application of U.S. and E.U. Antitrust Law (two vols.) (Springer, 2014). He came to Texas from Stanford Law School in 1976.
Description: This talk will examine how mergers and acquisitions affect R&D investment through two mechanisms: reducing price competition (which increases investment) and altering investment competition intensity (an overlooked factor in antitrust analysis). It will then challenge the assumption that more R&D will always be economically efficient, arguing that product R&D will tend to be over-incentivized while production-process R&D will be under-incentivized due to market imperfections. Prof. Markovits will further contend that current policies combining IP protections with immediate R&D expense deductions create uncertainty about optimal investment levels because we are not able to accurately measure how individual projects affect discovery probabilities or the true breadth of IP protection across different types of innovations.
Format: Prof. Richard S. Markovits will give a 30-minute talk, followed by a discussion moderated by Dr. Thibault Schrepel and a Q&A with the audience.