當數大不美--反壟斷還應該做些什麼？

When big isn’t beautiful 

當數大不美

What more should antitrust be doing? 

反壟斷還應該做些什麼？

The first of a series on areas where economists are rethinking the basics

經濟學家重新思考基礎系列文之一

Schools brief

Aug 8th 2020 edition

Aug 8th 2020

Donald turner, America’s top trustbuster in the mid-1960s, saw antitrust law as benefiting from an “inhospitable” tradition: on many matters its default response was to say no. Government lawyers routinely blocked mergers merely on the grounds that the resulting company would be too big. The companies’ counter-argument that being bigger would make them better was rarely entertained by the courts.

唐納德·特納（Donald Turner）是1960年代中期美國頂尖的反壟斷法檢查官，他認為反托拉斯法得益於「無情」的傳統：就許多問題而言，預設反應是否絕。政府律師經常阻止合併，只因形成的公司會變得太大。這些公司反駁說，擴大規模會使他們變得更好，但很少被法院接受。

In the 1970s the “Chicago school” of antitrust law successfully harnessed economics to argue for a much more hospitable approach. Over the following decades America’s regulators became so welcoming that critics painted them as doormats. In many industries the largest firms have consistently gained market share without any official concern; the most successful technology companies have grown into veritable titans. Many economists studying the subject now worry that a lack of competition is an economic drag, especially online. Some scholars go further, arguing that the Chicago school’s sense of what is good for consumers is not serving their broader interests.

在1970年代，反壟斷法的「芝加哥學派」成功藉由經濟學，主張較友善的態度。在隨後幾十年中，美國的監管機構變得如此敞臂歡迎，以至於批評者將他們描繪成有如門墊。在許多行業，最大的公司不斷地擴大市占，官方絲毫不以為意。最成功的科技公司已茁壯成名副其實的巨人。現在，許多研究這主題的經濟學家都擔心，缺乏競爭，尤其在線上領域，會拖累經濟。一些學者更進一步主張，芝加哥學派對什麼是有利消費者的見解，並不符合更廣泛的消費者利益。

The Chicago school, built on the work of Aaron Director, an economist from the mid-20th century, reached its zenith in the writing of the legal scholars Robert Bork and Richard Posner. Its proponents argued that many activities which were assumed to be anti-competitive were entirely reasonable strategies for improving corporate efficiency. They also claimed that in some cases even things which couldn’t be justified that way could safely be left to the market to sort out without recourse to law.

芝加哥學派奠基於20世紀中葉經濟學家艾朗·戴維德的研究，在法律學者羅伯特·貝克和理査•波斯納的文章中達到顛峰。支持者認為，許多被認為是反競爭的活動，其實是提高公司效率完全合理的策略。他們還聲稱，即使在某些情況下那個理由站不住腳，也可以放心留待市場解決，無需訴諸法律。

Take “predatory pricing”. Regulators thought that selling goods below cost so as to bankrupt competitors was malfeasance that had to be stopped. The Chicago school argued that it was a poor business strategy which would fail. Even if the predator crushed its competition, it would not remain a monopoly long enough to recoup its earlier losses. Instead, its high profits would attract new competitors.

以「掠奪性定價」為例。監管者認為，以低於成本的價格出售商品好讓競爭對手破產，是必須制止的不法行為。芝加哥學派則認為，這是糟糕的商業策略，終將失敗。即使掠奪者壓垮競爭對手，壟斷勢力也難持久得足以彌補先前的損失。相反地，高利潤將引來新競爭者。

Perhaps because, in the 1970s, American business had started to look more in need of help than hindrance, such arguments found favour with the American courts. And though the Chicago school’s influence was more limited elsewhere, many jurisdictions, including the European Union, adopted one of Bork’s central ideas: that the sole purpose of competition law should be to protect consumers. It is a view which forbids regulators from considerations of the broad public interest, limiting them to the busting of cartels and the prevention of mergers that create. Under this “consumer-welfare standard”, competition cases turn on forensic analysis of “upward pricing pressure”—ie, of the degree to which a merger or strategy will leave consumers out of pocket.

也許是如此，因為在1970年代，美國企業開始看起來更需要幫助，而不是阻礙，這種論點在美國法院受到青睞。儘管芝加哥學派的影響力在其他地方極為有限，但包括歐盟在內的許多司法管轄區，都採納了貝克的中心思想之一：競爭法的唯一目的應該是保護消費者。這種觀點禁止監管者考慮廣泛的公共利益，所考量的只局限於裂解卡特爾（多家公司為控制價格和限制競爭聯合組成的聯盟），以及阻止合併以免形成卡特爾。在這種「消費者福祉為準」下，競爭案件將變成「向上定價壓力」（即合併或戰略在多大程度上會導致消費者埋單）的法醫式分析。

But has this approach led regulators to miss the wood for the trees? In 2016 The Economist pointed to America’s high corporate profits and the rising market shares enjoyed by big firms as evidence that competition across the economy had waned. Later that year economists at the White House released a report making similar observations. A version of the trend can also be found in Europe. Research by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, finds that between 2000 and 2014 the share of sales accounted for by the top eight firms in a given industry rose by four percentage points in Europe and eight percentage points in North America (see chart).

但是，這種方法是否使監管官員見樹不見林？ 《經濟學人》在2016年指出，美國的公司獲利高和大公司享受持續上升的市占，證明了整個經濟領域的競爭已經減弱。同年稍後，白宮經濟學家發表報告，提出類似的觀察。這種趨勢也出現歐洲版本。富裕國家俱樂部OECD研究發現，在2000年至2014年之間，特定行業中前八大公司的銷售額占比，在歐洲增加4個百分點，在北美增加8個百分點。

Many antitrust experts are unconcerned: industrial concentration, they argue, does not tell you how competitive the market for a particular good is. But some economists have blamed falling levels of competition for far-reaching economic ills, such as stagnant labour markets and growing inequality. In a paper published in 2019 the late Emmanuel Farhi of Harvard and François Gourio of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago argued that the rising market power of big companies was linked to low interest rates and weak investment, factors shaping the whole economy.

許多反壟斷專家並不憂心：他們辯稱，產業集中化並不能告訴你特定商品市場的競爭程度。但是一些經濟學家將競爭水平下降，歸咎於影響深遠的經濟弊病，例如勞動力市場停滯和不平等現象加劇。在2019年發表的一篇論文中，哈佛大學已故的伊曼紐爾·法希（Emmanuel Farhi）和芝加哥聯邦儲備銀行的弗朗索瓦·古里奧（FrançoisGourio）認為，大公司市場勢力不斷增強，與低利率和投資疲軟有關，這些因素塑造了整個經濟。

As in the days of the Chicago school, other economists see these critiques as ignoring the role of efficiency. A recently published paper by David Autor and John Van Reenen of MIT, David Dorn of the University of Zurich, Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Christina Patterson of the University of Chicago argues that globalisation and technological advances have concentrated economic activity in a small number of “superstar firms”. Because these firms are more productive, the industries which have seen the most of this concentration have also seen the fastest productivity growth.

就像在芝加哥學派時代一樣，其他經濟學家認為這些評論忽略了效率的作用。麻省理工學院的David Autor和John Van Reenen，蘇黎世大學的David Dorn，哈佛大學的勞倫斯·康茲（Lawrence Katz）和芝加哥大學的克莉絲丁娜·帕特森（Christina Patterson）最近發表的論文指出，全球化和技術進步已造成經濟活動集中在少數「超級巨星公司」。由於這些公司的生產率更高，集中度最高的行業也見到最快的生產率成長。

It is when they are applied to technology giants that these arguments get most heated. In America the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, Congress and many states are investigating whether Amazon’s dominant position in online shopping, Apple’s immense profitability or the duopoly that Facebook and Google enjoy in online advertising can be seen as involving the abuse of the giants’ market power. Google has been the subject of three separate competition investigations by the EU and fined €8.2bn ($9.7bn).

當這些論點被套用到科技巨擘時，爭論變得最為激烈。在美國，司法部、聯邦貿易委員會、國會和許多州，正在調查亞馬遜在線上購物的支配地位、蘋果的巨大獲利能力、臉書和谷歌在線上廣告中享有的雙頭壟斷，能否被視為涉及濫用巨擘的市場力量。歐盟已對谷歌進行了三項獨立的競爭調查，並處以82億歐元（約97億美元）的罰款。

Competition in, or competition for? 競爭是目的還是手段？

Businesses built on “platforms”, as Amazon, Facebook and Google are, raise particular issues when it comes to competition because they have two separate sets of customers. Amazon deals with both retailers and consumers, Facebook and Google with both users and advertisers. In the 2000s Jean Tirole and Jean-Charles Rochet, two French economists, laid out an economic framework for looking at such platform businesses which showed that their optimal strategy will often be to provide cheap access to one side of the platform and charge steeply on the other. Consumers enjoy free Google searching and Facebook socialising; advertisers pay through the nose to reach them as they do so.

建立在「平台」上的企業，如亞馬遜、臉書和谷歌，尤其引發競爭爭議，因為擁有兩組不同的客戶。亞馬遜同時與零售商和消費者有生意往來，臉書和谷歌則與用戶和廣告主打交道。兩位法國經濟學家珍·蒂羅爾（Jean Tirole）和珍·查爾斯·羅謝（Jean-Charles Rochet）提出研究此類平台業務的經濟框架，顯示他們的最佳策略通常是對平台的一端提供廉價存取管道，並向另一端索取高額費用。消費者享受免費的谷歌搜尋和臉書社交；廣告主則為觸及他們而花大錢。

Platforms existed before big technology firms: television, newspapers and credit cards are all platforms of sorts. But the internet has provided vast scale and reach. Adding users is cheap, and it is often the case that the more users a platform has the more attractive it becomes to those yet to sign up. A firm that attains critical mass becomes overwhelmingly dominant: winner takes all.

平台在大型科技公司成立前就存在了：電視、報紙和信用卡都是某種形式的平台。但是網際網路提供了龐大的規模和觸及範圍。增加用戶的成本低廉，而且通常情況是，平台用戶愈多，對尚未註冊的人就愈有吸引力。達到臨界規模的公司，將取得壓倒性的主導地位：贏者全拿。

Does it matter if the winning platforms dominate the digital economy? In terms of consumer welfare it seems, on the face of it, a sweet deal: users get stuff which is of real value to them at a price—zero—to which no one can object. But on the other side of the platforms things look more worrying. A recent investigation by Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority found that the cost of digital advertising for firms was worth £500 ($650) per household per year. Were the market less concentrated, those costs might fall—and some of the savings would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices.

如果贏家平台宰制數位經濟，要不要緊？表面看來，就消費者福祉而言，這似乎是一筆甜美的交易：用戶免費得到具有真正價值的東西，這點沒人反對。但是在平台的另一端，事情看起來更令人擔憂。英國競爭與市場管理局最近一項調查發現，企業數位廣告成本為每戶每年價值500英鎊（650美元）。假如市場集中度較低，這些成本可能會下降，而且一些省下的錢將以降價形式轉移給消費者。

Another potential worry is that there are conflicts of interest in many big-tech business models, such as when Apple sells through its app-store software which competes with its own, or when Amazon collects data about the sales of third-party products with which it competes.

另一個隱憂是，許多大型高科技商業模式存在利益衝突，例如，蘋果透過應用程式商店銷售與自家產品競爭的軟體，亞馬遜收集對手的第三方產品銷售數據。

Perhaps concentration would be tolerable if the big firms lived in fear of usurpation by a hot new entrant. But startup platforms face growing barriers to entry. One is amassing the reams of data which enable firms to tailor their services to individual users. Another is that in the digital economy it is relatively easy for an incumbent to see what it is that users like about what a startup offers, provide something similar and push it out to millions (if not billions) of existing users. That reduces the incentive to innovate in the first place. A final worry is that wealthy incumbents can close off the possibility of competition by buying new entrants before they pose a real threat, as when Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. In the decade to 2019 the five largest technology firms made over 400 acquisitions with scant intervention by competition authorities.

如果大公司活在新進者篡位恐懼下，也許集中是可以容忍的。但是，新創平台面臨愈來愈多的進入障礙。一是累積大量數據，這些數據使公司能夠為個別用戶，量身定製服務。另一個是在數位經濟中，老牌公司相對容易看出用戶喜歡新創公司提供的哪些產品、提供類似產品，並將其推銷給數百萬（如果不是數十億）現有用戶。這在一開始就降低了創新的動力。最後要擔心的是，有錢的老牌企業可在市場新秀構成真正威脅前，把它買下來，藉此消除可能的競爭者，例如臉書在

2012年收購Instagram，並在2014年併購WhatsApp。在截至2019年的十年中，五大科技公司完成400多起收購案，競爭當局很少干預。

There are, broadly speaking, two sets of ideas for reforming competition economics and antitrust enforcement in response to these worries. Adherents of the more radical call themselves “neo-Brandeisians” after Louis Brandeis, an early-20th-century American Supreme Court justice who thought the overarching purpose of government antitrust action should be to prevent any one firm from exerting too much power over the economy. Neo-Brandeisians such as Lina Khan of Columbia Law School and Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, a think-tank, want to broaden the purpose of antitrust investigations beyond promoting consumer welfare. Governments, they argue, should not fear breaking up the tech giants; they should fear leaving them be. In this view the companies’ size and power are a threat not just to consumers and workers but to democracy itself.

大致來說，有兩套改革競爭經濟學和反壟斷執法的思想，回應了這些顧慮。其中較激進一派的擁護者自稱是「新布蘭迪斯主義者」，指的是20世紀初美國最高法院法官路易斯·布蘭迪斯（Louis Brandeis），他認為政府反壟斷行動的首要目的，應是防止任何一家公司對經濟發揮太大的影響力。新布蘭迪斯主義者，例如哥倫比亞法學院的麗娜·翰（Lina Khan）和智庫「美國經濟自由方案」的馬特·斯托勒，希望反壟斷調查的目的應該更廣，不只是增進消費者福祉。他們認為，政府不該害怕分拆科技巨頭；該怕的是任其為所欲為。依照這種觀點，公司的規模和勢力不僅威脅消費者和勞工，也威脅了民主本身。

Each time I roam… 每次我漫遊...

To its Chicago-school critics, Neo-Brandeisianism is “hipster antitrust”, replacing a transparent and rigorous methodology with an ill-defined set of social goals. It might disempower technology firms, but it would empower regulators. If concentrations of market power should be viewed with suspicion, so should concentrations of regulatory power: they bring the risk of arbitrary and unaccountable decision-making. In America, its home territory, this debate is predictably partisan: neo-Brandeisians are listened to only by Democrats.

對於芝加哥學派的批評者來說，新布蘭迪斯主義是「時髦的反壟斷」，用一套界定不明確的社會目標，取代一套透明而嚴謹的方法。它可能剝奪科技公司的權力，卻會賦權監管者。若是應該以懷疑眼光看待市場力量集中，那麼也該對監管力量的集中存疑：這會帶來決策武斷和不負責任的風險。在新布蘭迪斯主義的起源地美國，這場辯論一如所料黨派立場分明：唯獨民主黨聽信新布蘭迪斯主義者那一套。

The second set of ideas for reform is more incremental. It seeks not to abolish the consumer-welfare standard but to reinterpret it. Carl Shapiro of the University of California, Berkeley, has suggested calling it the “protecting competition standard” to make clear that it takes into account all the harm that anti-competitive practices might do to consumer welfare, including that which is indirect or diffuse.

第二套改革思想較循序漸進。並不試圖廢除消費者福祉標準，而是重新詮釋。加州大學伯克萊分校的卡爾·夏皮羅（Carl Shapiro）建議稱之為「保護競爭的標準」，表明已全面考慮到反競爭做法對消費者福祉可能造成的種種傷害，包括間接的或滲透性的傷害。

Applying this interpretation of the consumer-welfare standard to digital platforms means accepting that in some situations firms will naturally grow large, meaning that at any point in time there will be little “competition in the market”. But there can still be “competition for the market” if a new, better product has a chance to disrupt the status quo. That might mean blocking more of the sort of early acquisitions which snuff out potential competitors, or reversing the burden of proof in such cases, so that the merging companies have to show that their plans will benefit consumers. It also might mean forcing incumbents to share some of their data, or at least making it easier for users to switch easily between platforms.

把這種對消費者福祉標準的解釋套用於數位平台，意味接受在某些情況下，公司自然會壯大，意即隨時都會出現幾乎沒有「市場競爭」的情況。但是，如果某種更好的新產品有機會打破現狀，那麼仍然可能有「市場競爭」。這可能意味著阻止更多意在扼殺潛在競爭對手的早期收購案，或在這種情況下將舉證責任對調，以至於合併的公司必須證明，他們的計畫將有利消費者。這也可能意味著迫使目前的市場支配者分享一部分數據，或至少讓用戶更容易在平台間輕鬆轉換。

This agenda might not do much to satisfy neo-Brandeisian complaints about the political power of tech titans today. But it could succeed at making life at the top slightly more precarious. ■

對抱怨當今科技巨擘政治勢力的布蘭迪斯主義者而言，這個議程或許無法令人滿意，但至少能讓高高在上者的日子過得稍微戰戰兢兢。 ■