2025 Antitrust and Competition Conference - Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas
April 10-11, 2025
Gleacher Center - Chicago- April 10, 2025
About the Conference
Back in 1957, Benjamin A. Rogge wrote that public financing of education was a problem because “he who pays the piper will call the tune.” The annual Stigler conference, Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas, will take this connection between financing and the production and diffusion of ideas to heart: we will explore whether the increased market concentration we have witnessed in the last decades negatively impacts our marketplace of ideas, academia, news, and information production and diffusion more broadly, and what can be done about it.
The discussion will start by covering the market for news production and consumption, where the digital platforms and media empires owned by billionaires play an increasingly important role in shaping our public square. We will then move to explore whether market concentration can create pernicious biases on the incentives to produce and diffuse expert knowledge—with a focus on academia (as Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter recently remarked) and law and economics more broadly. We will conclude by exploring how economic concentration is influencing the world of think tanks, politics, and policymaking.
Join us for an engaging conversation on how ideas are produced and diffused in our modern societies.
This conference is by invitation only and is on the record, live-streamed, and recorded.
Call for Papers
The Stigler Center is inviting submissions of short academic pieces (up to 2000 words) focused on how economic concentration can impact the marketplace of ideas. The authors of the best submissions will have their work published on ProMarket and will be invited to discuss their ideas at the conference. Find more detailed information here.
Deadline: Please submit your contributions here by January 5th, 2025 (11:59pm Chicago time.)
Conference Organizers
- Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- Guy Rolnik, Clinical Professor of Strategic Management, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- Filippo Lancieri, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University; Fellow, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Conference Venue:
Gleacher Center
450 Cityfront Plaza Dr, Chicago, IL 60611
For more information, contact:
Rachel Piontek, Director, Stigler Center