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Carl Shapiro

Carl Shapiro

Distinguished Professor, Haas School of Business

University of California, Berkeley

Carl Shapiro is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He also is the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy Emeritus at the Haas School of Business.

Shapiro had the honor of serving as a Senate-confirmed Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during 2011-12. For the two years immediately prior to that, he was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice; he also held that position during 1995-96. From 1998 to 2008, Shapiro served as Director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at UC Berkeley. He has been Editor and Co-Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, among other honors. Shapiro earned his Ph.D. in Economics at M.I.T. in 1981, taught at Princeton University during the 1980s, and has been on the faculty at UC Berkeley since 1990.

Shapiro is the co-author, with Hal R. Varian, of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, published by the Harvard Business School Press. Information Rules has received critical acclaim for its application of economic principles to the Information Economy and has been widely read by managers and adopted for classroom use.

Shapiro has published extensively in the areas of industrial organization, competition policy, patents, the economics of innovation, and competitive strategy. His current research interests include competition policy, the economics of innovation, the design and use of patents, housing finance, and energy and environmental economics.

Recent Events and Presentations

January 31, 2024

The DOJ-FTC 2023 Merger Guidelines: Evolution or Revolution?

Watch now to learn more about the ongoing efforts to reform U.S. antitrust law.

October 22, 2021

Dynamic Antitrust Discussion Series: “Biden’s Executive Order on Competition”

ITIF hosted the ninth in a series of discussions on “dynamic antitrust,” in which Aurelien Portuese, ITIF’s director of antitrust and innovation policy, sits down with leading scholars and antitrust enforcers in Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere to discuss the path forward in making antitrust a foundation for innovation.

October 4, 2018

Scaling Innovation: Why We Should Preserve the Consumer Welfare Standard in Antitrust Policy

For the last 40 years, antitrust policy has been guided by what is known as the consumer welfare standard, but some activists have advocated for going back to a time when government actively pushed back against the formation of large firms.

October 26, 2017

Antitrust and Innovation: What the Alarmists Get Wrong

Many technology industries are characterized by relatively high levels of industry concentration, with one or a few firms holding significant market share. This has sparked alarm among some who assert that such concentration is anti-consumer and call for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. Yet antitrust scholars have shown that in many cases the concentration helps consumers and spurs economic growth.

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