How common ownership can stifle competition with Prof Fiona Scott Morton

"Common Ownership" refers to the idea that asset managers own pieces of companies that compete with one another in the product market, for example, Coke and Pepsi. When asset managers own a large proportion of shares, it may be that a significant total share of a company is held by owners that are in common with the companies' rivals. Professor Fiona Scott Morton asks whether this pattern creates a competition problem that competition authorities should be investigating.

Fiona M. Scott Morton is the Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics at the Yale University School of Management and an Adjunct Professor at Yale Law School. Her field of economics is Industrial Organization, the study of firms, markets, and competition. The focus of her research is the economics of competition policy and antitrust enforcement, as well as competition in healthcare markets. From 2011-12 Professor Scott Morton served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis (Chief Economist) at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she helped enforce the nation’s antitrust laws. She frequently presents to government agencies tasked with enforcing competition law and is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel, the European policy think tank. At Yale SOM she teaches courses in competitive strategy and competition economics. She served as Associate Dean from 2007-10 and has won the School’s teaching award three times. At Yale Law School Professor Scott Morton teaches Antitrust Law. She founded and directs the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale, a vehicle to provide more competition policy programming to Yale students and the wider competition community. She holds a BA from Yale and a PhD from MIT, both in Economics, and has dual citizenship with the UK.