Joseph V. Coniglio talks with Georgetown emeritus professor Steven C. Salop about the rise of strategic oligopoly models, the evolving lawyer–economist relationship, and debates over consumer welfare versus broader goals like democracy and inequality.

Publications Mentioned

• Salop, Steven C. "Monopolistic Competition with Outside Goods." The Bell Journal of Economics 10, no. 1 (1979): 141–156.
• Salop, Steven C., ed. Strategy, Predation, and Antitrust Analysis. Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission, Bureau of Economics, Bureau of Competition, 1981.
• Salop, Steven C., and David T. Scheffman. "Raising Rivals' Costs." The American Economic Review 73, no. 2 (1983): 267–271.
• Baker, Jonathan B., and Steven C. Salop. "Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Inequality." Georgetown Law Journal Online 104 (2015): 1–28.
• Salop, Steven C. Modern Economic Analysis: An Antitrust Law Guide. Washington, DC: Steven C. Salop, 2024.

Cases Mentioned

• United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, 148 F.2d 416 (2d Cir. 1945).
• United Mine Workers v. Pennington, 381 U.S. 657 (1965).
• Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 509 U.S. 209 (1993).
• United States v. United States Steel Corp., 251 U.S. 417 (1920).

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Joseph V. Coniglio: Thank you for joining us. My name is Joseph Coniglio and I am senior counsel and director of antitrust and innovation policy at the Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy here at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, ITIF. And I'm proud to announce the release of our ninth episode of our antitrust speaker series, Creative Discussion.

We're channeling Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction. We'll be having wide ranging and in-depth discussions with antitrust's greatest luminaries to discuss hot topics in antitrust, tech, economics and beyond, as well as get to know a little bit about some of the people who've really been the leading lights of the antitrust world over the past several years and decades.

So, when it comes to talking with antitrust luminaries, I really think we've outdone ourselves with our guest for this current episode. Steve Salop, professor of economics and law emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center. His reputation really precedes him for anybody who knows antitrust.

But needless to say, I think Steve really is one of the top antitrust thinkers of his generation, and we're very glad to have him here.

Steve started his career as an economist in government. First at the Federal Reserve Board and the Civil Aeronautics Board before moving over to the FTC, first in the Bureau of Consumer Protection and then the Bureau of Economics, before joining the faculty at Georgetown, where he would teach for over 30 years.

And I'm proud to say, in full disclosure, Steve was my antitrust professor, so it's an added pleasure to have him here. Steve really has published some of the most important articles in antitrust, over the past many years including, of course, his seminal piece on exclusionary conduct, which I know we'll talk about, and really was the foundation for what is known as the post-Chicago approach and critique of the Chicago School, which Steve would pioneer, as well as dozens of other influential articles some of which, again, I hope we'll get into that really run the gamut of antitrust law and economics, the economic analysis of law and much more.

In addition to teaching and scholarship Steve worked as a senior consultant and expert at the economic consulting firm, Charles River Associates, really one of the top firms in the business where he's advised as well on numerous antitrust matters, mergers and otherwise over the years.

Despite being retired, Steve continues to publish, most recently a great new textbook, which I've got here on antitrust law and economics, which I would commend to our listeners and which I hope we can discuss. So Steve, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to the Schumpeter Podcast.

Steve Salop: Thanks, Joe. I should tell everyone Joe is my favorite student the year I taught antitrust to him, and it's really fun to be here. I just have one criticism, Joe. You did not hold the book up so everybody could see it

Joseph V. Coniglio: We'll get back to that when we talk about it later, Steve. But no, it really is a great book.

Steve Salop: Good enough. Good enough.

Joseph V. Coniglio: It is a great book. Before we get into the antitrust, Steve I want to just start, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. How did you get into antitrust law and economics all those years ago?

Steve Salop: It's really a long, winding path. I started out in the economics of imperfect information.

And what you need to understand, I think it's been forgotten at this point, but in the late '70s, or in the '70s more generally, this whole literature on imperfect information began, and it showed that imperfect information was a significant market failure if it led to the competitive equilibrium being inefficient if it existed.

The famous Rothschild-Stiglitz model showed that sometimes with imperfect information, there's no equilibrium.

So, it was really a revolution in the way economists were thinking about competitive equilibrium. And as part of it, this idea of informational market power was in the middle of it.

In fact, one of the seminal articles written by Peter Diamond that started the field showed that even otherwise perfectly competitive firms would have a degree of market power if there was imperfect information, and it could lead to the competitive equilibrium not being at the competitive price, but rather being at the monopoly price.

And that was a pretty nifty result, and I pursued that in work after I got my dissertation done. And what that led to was, in order to understand that equilibrium, it was a monopolistically competitive equilibrium. There was imperfect information, so price was above the competitive level, but we allowed free entry, and so it became monopolistic competition.

And that led me and as well as Spence, Stiglitz, Dixit, others into becoming interested in monopolistic competition. Okay, I have this paper in which I analyzed the Hotelling model on a circle and solved for the competitive equilibrium there . Stiglitz and Dixit had a paper in which they had a representative firm.

So I did localized competition. They did non-localized competition. So, that work into monopolistic competition led all of us into learning about imperfect competition and oligopoly and ultimately into antitrust. And it was true about the, the whole bunch of us that were coming of age during that period.

Joseph V. Coniglio: No, that, that's really interesting, Steve. And I guess I would say, obviously, in addition to that economic revolution you described, there was also another economic revolution going on, known as sort of the Chicago School in antitrust, the application of price theory.

And of course, you were very close to that being at the FTC, in the late '70s and early '80s. It was funny, I was almost going to describe you as an economist in the Reagan administration, which is technically true, I think, but perhaps probably not a good title. So what was that like at that time?

Steve Salop: Okay, so my path. I started at the CAB during deregulation, so that was definitely Chicago School. Indeed Alfred Kahn, who was chair, got really worried about allowing entry. He said, "Oh, won't all the flights leave at the same time?" And I said "No, the Hotelling model had no price competition."

If you allow people to price compete, they won't have an incentive to both land on exactly the same leaving time. They'll wanna separate, so they have some degree of market power. So, from there, I went after the dereg, very much deregulatory. I went to the FTC, and at the FTC, I was actually recruited by the consumer protection lawyers who wanted me to try to justify the Kid Vid rule, which was gonna ban advertising to children.

So I started off doing imperfect information. I did not solve the Kid Vid problem. I did solve it, but it was technologically not feasible. I wanted to have bleepers that you could bleep out the commercials. Turns out it was a little bit ahead of its time.

So, from there, I did consumer protection, this is a long story, and eventually got involved in the antitrust mission at the FTC.

There was a lot going on. It wasn't just Kid Vid. There was a lot going on in competition.

I came to the FTC in the summer of '78. Then Bork's book came out, and Areeda-Turner rule came out. So, it was a very exciting time. And what I did, besides working on the cases and trying to come up with plaintiff theories that worked, we had a conference.

I had some what was called end-of-year money, that I was given the permission to create a conference, which became the FTC conference on strategy, predation, and antitrust. And it brought together the young people, the people soon out of graduate school that were working on what we now call post-Chicago economics.

Ordover Willig, Rich Gilbert Mike Porter, people like that. And we had that conference, and that ultimately led to raising rivals' costs. A whole confluence of issues came together for me, and one day, one day it came to me. "Oh, that's all raising rivals' costs." Wrote the article over the weekend.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Yeah, let's get into that though because I think you're right. You have these two big trends. You've got the Chicago revolution price theory and all that, but then you also have this other strain with the information economics, and I really do think in some ways your work on post-Chicago synthesizes both of those.

So, can you just walk us through basically what the raising rivals' cost argument was? How is game theory sort of the foundation for post-Chicago? What is the theory, Steve?

Steve Salop: The theory was really pretty simple. Everybody was thinking about exclusion at the time in terms of predatory pricing. And predatory pricing, oh they lower the price maybe below cost, maybe not. That was part of the controversy. And the monopolist loses money for a period of time, and then he recoups it later on charging a high price. So, one attack on that, which was an article by Joskow Klevorick, said, "Wait a minute, recoupment's not certain." And they said the test ought to be based on recoupment, not on price below cost, the way Areeda-Turner did it. Now, we know ultimately the Brooke Group rule had both things. It had below cost and recoupment.

Joskow and Klevorick said, " It's really hard to know whether price is below cost, and that's not really the right standard anyway." And they looked back at all the old predatory pricing cases and said almost all of them involved impossibility of recoupment because there were no barriers to entry. There was that strand.

And so I saw this, that this wasn't about price. This was about something else.

So, there had been work on building excess capacity to deter entry, going back to Alcoa. That was the theory in Alcoa. And Dixit and Spence had articles showing that if you created excess capacity, that could deter entry. And in particular, if you had excess capacity, then an entrant would assume there would be a post-entry price war, and so they wouldn't enter, but yet you'd be able to maintain the monopoly price all along because it wasn't the price that deterred entry, it was the excess capacity. And so that was all floating around.

And I taught at Penn one year when Ollie Williamson was away and read his article on the Pennington case, which was all about raising the wage rate as a barrier to entry.

And then one day, Dave Scheffman walked into my office and said, "In the oil industry, maybe what they're doing is raising costs." And bing, that's when I put it all together.

And as a general matter, you can think of all of this conduct as what we called non-price predation at the time, but it was really about raising rivals' costs in order to foreclose them and gaining market power as a result.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Yeah. I definitely think it's become mainstream. I think regardless of who you talk to,

Steve Salop: Yeah.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Everybody accepts now that raising rivals' costs foreclosure is a key part of the analysis. And it's funny you mention Williamson, because when I think of sort of the other way in which those two strands, sort of the Chicago strand and the information economics strand meet, I think his work on transaction cost economics is also, in a way, interpreting that about how vertical agreements can deal with incomplete information.

Steve Salop: He did every, he did everything. He just did everything.

Joseph V. Coniglio: So fascinating, Steve. Let's shift gears a little bit now because I think obviously you've written a ton of articles over the years that have been amazing and are cited by hundreds, right? But you were also working as an economic consultant, right? And there was a practical aspect to this new economic approach to antitrust that you and others pioneered.

So, can you talk about how the practice of antitrust evolved and how the working relationship that we take for granted today between lawyers and economists really developed and what that was like from your perspective?

Steve Salop: Okay. There, there have always been economic consultants in antitrust. In fact if you or your listeners read Herb Hovenkamp's Substack for today, he talked about there were economists involved in the U.S. Steel case. I had not known that.

Joseph V. Coniglio: I saw it. I hadn't read it yet, Steve. I was preparing for this.

Steve Salop: What I learned was that lawyers and economists should be working together.

I'll tell you where post-Chicago came from was the head of the Bureau of Economics at the time, Bill Kometer. When he heard about my stuff, he said, " Steve, you reach all the pre-Chicago results, but with their tools." And Jim DeLong, Brad DeLong's father, was my colleague, he's the one who told me about Bork. He said, " Bork's got this new book. I think you've got the answer." And then a couple years later, Herb Hovenkamp said, "Oh, this is the economics after Chicago."

Joseph V. Coniglio: Let me just ask you that real quick, Steve, does post-Chicago mean that you agree with the Chicago critique of structure?

Steve Salop: Okay, so it's basically taking the basic economic model and consumer welfare standard, now more broadly defined as a given. And what Chicago did, Chicago— except for Stigler's article on oligopoly which, oh, collusion's really hard— Chicago is all about basic price theory, perfect competition, and contrasting that to monopoly. They really did not develop oligopoly game theory at all. And so what post-Chicago did was we introduced oligopoly models. Strategic barriers to entry was the entree. They thought barriers to entry were just natural.

Joseph V. Coniglio: But do you agree with the structural critique or the critique of structural presumptions that Chicago made? I think some ways when you hear post-Chicago, it's yeah they were right. Chicago was right against vis-a-vis Harvard, but there was stuff they were missing that you point out.

Steve Salop: The idea that structure implies conduct implies performance, that was too simple. That had already been upended in 1973 at the Airlie House conference. But, it came back. It turns out structure does matter.

Joseph V. Coniglio: We're gonna get to that.

Steve Salop: Just it's a much weaker, it's just a much weaker correlation than was believed.

And meanwhile, I discovered later on that Joe Bain had strategic entry barriers. That was ignored. But if you go back, he's got an article in 1950 in its way, it anticipated raising rivals' costs.

I just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right slogan.

Joseph V. Coniglio: I want to get back to that. The slogan's another thing, too. You've obviously been influential in what that consumer welfare standard means, versus the total surplus idea and the consumer surplus idea. And I think generally there's still some debate about this, right? But I think generally the view that it's consumer surplus is generally accepted.

Now, there's a whole bunch of other debates now about workers and suppliers and other groups we need to take into account. Maybe we can get into that later.

But I do want to follow up on one thing, on the economics side, though, because I totally agree that, economics cannot be separated from antitrust, and it's always been like that.

But what do you say to some of the critics that talk about the modern practice of economics in antitrust, where you have these really expensive battles of the experts, right? You can hire an economist maybe to get them to say whatever you want in support of your theory. Do you think there is some legitimate critique to— not economics generally getting involved in antitrust— but the way it's being done now?

Steve Salop: Yeah, it's big money, man. You can find an economist who's willing to take any position. And interestingly, it's not that the economists are deviating from their views, they've adopted those views. Look, confirmation bias and Stockholm syndrome are my favorite sins. The same favorite behavioral economic sins.

And, if you work on a case you have a tendency to agree with your client. I don't witness, and that's really important because it gives me a distance from what the clients are saying. So, I can do a better job than a lot of people in seeing what the other side would think, regardless of the side I'm on.

Because if you're testifying, you're always trying to figure out, "What's my defensible position?" And that's your goal. And that can give you tunnel vision as to what's going on. But yeah, you can find economists that'll take any position, and I think that's a problem.

I'd like to see more economic peer review. I'd like to see more testimony get published and critiqued by other economists after the fact. We do that to some extent, but not enough, and often the testimony, the reports— which is where the action is— the reports are under seal. But it'd be really useful to get those things out in the open.

I totally agree. Economists, the value that they provide is indispensable. But, maybe some ways we can reform the process a little bit. But I want to get back now to where we are contemporary, Steve, the return of structure.

Joseph V. Coniglio: One way to think about that is not just maybe a weak correlation, neo-Harvard sort of thing between structure and performance, but the emergence of new reform approaches, especially on the left of center to antitrust. Not just taking different economic views, but in some ways critiquing the consumer welfare standard, an economic welfare standard in favor of a more political approach to antitrust.

And I'm talking specifically about the neo-Brandeisians, who of course by now we're all very familiar with.

Maybe talk a little bit about what your critique of the Chicago School was. How do you think it differs from what we're seeing today with these new neo-Brandeisians?

Steve Salop: Just the idea that, having small firms is good for democracy, so it's a political defense of market structure. And that's a very different critique of the Chicago School than what you put forward. And I guess my question is: what do you make of that critique from the neo-Brandeisians?

Okay, so first of all the work that we post-Chicagoans have done have all been under the given assumption that it's about economic welfare short term, or to the extent innovation matters longer term. But it's not about democracy, not about inequality and so on. So, in terms of the critique, I'm very sympathetic to the critique, as a citizen. I think that we need to protect democracy and we need an antitrust that facilitates democracy. I think the antitrust rules are like the proximate target but we have underlying or overarching goals that we want the law to satisfy.

We want antitrust to help create prosperity, facilitate prosperity, facilitate innovation, but we also want it to create social stability by sharing the benefits of that prosperity. I think that's really important. If the powerful person gets everything, gets all the benefits, then the citizenry that are basically slaves to the power class they're not gonna want democracy anymore.

That's my next question, I think, because you talk about antitrust and trying to have a balance of power, right? So, not everything goes to the top. But you have an article with Jon Baker in 2015 where you talk about antitrust and inequality, and you get into some of the issues there, I think very astutely, about the problems that exist when you try and use antitrust to tackle distributional goals, right?

Joseph V. Coniglio: And issues about interpersonal utility comparisons, and these are very old critiques, but I think they're still valid. So, how from an economist perspective can we incorporate inequality goals, in the way you're talking about, given the problems that you mention in that article?

Steve Salop: Yeah I'm smiling because what you're saying, we saw the problems, we were critiquing Dan Crane's article, which said antitrust should ignore inequality. We said, "Actually, there's quite a bit that antitrust can do—

Joseph V. Coniglio: Tell me. Tell me.

Steve Salop: —to facilitate reduction in inequality." We didn't say it was perfect.

We said it was limits. But what antitrust could do is if you've got a tighter merger law, then you're gonna have fewer cases of monopoly, and that'll help consumers over stockholders. Remember, every merger, ten percent of the value goes to the lawyers, economists, and investment bankers.

That's a big tax being paid to the rich if you care about inequality. I think antitrust should be targeting supermarket prices and gasoline prices, not the price of yachts, was the kind of the joke we would make.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Prosecutorial discretion, right? Use your resources wisely.

Steve Salop: Use your resources wisely. More intervention is gonna reduce inequality.

I think again, the idea that antitrust enforcement can benefit democracy and reduce inequality is definitely true. The question is, do we wanna actually incorporate inequality and democracy into the standards we use to enforce the law rather than an economic welfare standard? And I think that's where people part grounds, with the neo-Brandeisians and some others.

Yeah. Yeah. The question is,is it a good thing to bring into antitrust? So, in mergers Lina Khan is quoted at some point as saying, "I don't think economic welfare should be the criteria. We should just tighten up on merger law for its own sake." Now, that's something that you could test, to see just what the effect is.

I, at some point with a student of mine who's now at Axinn, looked into aggregate concentration. If we're worried about democracy, is it more about market concentration, or is it more about aggregate concentration? And what we found is that aggregate concentration, more stable than I would've thought, in terms of the top one hundred firms.

I've said that and I think others have as well that, you can think of a lot of firms that have market power. Let's say a guy's got a patent, but that doesn't mean they have any political power, right? And you can think of very powerful firms that don't have any market power, but they're very influential for a variety of reasons.

Joseph V. Coniglio: The general correlation between fighting market power and promoting democracy I think is tough to hold, even though obviously in some cases antitrust enforcement in a lot of cases could improve.

Steve Salop: Yeah. So, maybe the answer is we need countervailing power. If we got big business, maybe you need big unions and big farmer co-ops.

Joseph V. Coniglio: So Steve, obviously you're retired, but you're obviously still thinking deeply about all these issues. And you said I didn't give it enough credit up front, so I'm gonna hold it up here now for everybody to see, your new book, Modern Economic Analysis and Antitrust Law: A Guide.

You've written so many articles, but you actually haven't done a lot of books, I think, relative to others. And so why did you write this particular book now?

Steve Salop: Okay. So first of all, this is the only book. I edited the book at the FTC Strategy, Predation, and Antitrust, which you can still download from the web. This, by the way, is free for download. You can download the whole book or each chapter individually from the website.

I think it's called econantitrustguide.com. Or if you want the nice glossy cover that my friend Claude and I designed it's $22 on Amazon. I did the book 'cause I'm not retired. Because how could I ever admit that I'm retired? I don't play golf. And so, the genesis of the book is that Francis and Sprigman's open source casebook came out, and I didn't really like the way they treated raising rivals' cost in the book.

They had an excerpt from my article. It was a perfectly good excerpt, but it's just there, rather than running all the way through their analysis of exclusion. And I started to write an article on exclusion, which is where I've done a lot of my work. And with the encouragement of Daniel Francis and John Baker, it kept growing and growing.

And so you will recognize this, Joe, it's all my lectures, updated, and in prose rather than on slides. It was very easy to write, actually. It just wrote itself. The hard part was editing. I stupidly got a professional editor who made me improve it and improve it.

So, I'm pretty happy with it as it came out. It's a basic modern economic approach to the theories and the case law. And that's what its main use is for students to learn the modern economic approach. And then there's again, something you recognize because we talked about it when you were a student, the major theme is that you can think about antitrust law as a triple helix of the statutes and ideology, on the one hand, economics analysis on the second hand. And being an economist, the third hand is decision theory, and it's the interplay of decision theory with economic analysis. And I used to just say the statutes, but I realized it's not just the statutes, it's also the political and economic ideology as opposed to the analysis.

And it's those three things together that create antitrust standards. And they evolve as we learn more about economics, as ideology changes, or as we get better at decision theory, the standards can evolve. And so that's the conceptual theme of the book, is that interaction and then, the basic economic analysis of the cases and the doctrines.

Joseph V. Coniglio: I'd highly recommend it. Not just for law students, but even practitioners. It's got a lot there that I think folks should look at. And I guess, before we conclude, Steve, I want to ask one more question, based on the book, but I think it ties together a lot of themes that we've already touched on.

It's a general book. You really do set the standard for what antitrust law is about, and you say conduct that harms consumers, workers, or suppliers by allowing firms unilaterally or concerted to exercise market power. Really a general economic statement of antitrust.

And I guess I would just say, going back to what we talked about before, and this idea that maybe there are other goals in antitrust, right? And I think about a case about excessive pricing, which is, something we've talked about over the years, right? Excessive pricing surely can harm consumers in some cases, right?

But it's per se lawful under the antitrust laws. Now, maybe you can say there's a decision theoretic justification for that based on innovation. Maybe, right? But is it more that maybe there is some other non-economic moral, like the Colgate doctrine, right? Just other notions about what the competitive process means that make antitrust law what it is, right?

The economics is important, but the statutes also fundamentally matter when we talk about what we're going to ban and what we're not going to ban. So, what would you say to that sort of maybe a little bit of a critique on a purely economic-focused view of antitrust?

Steve Salop: Look, I've got an article on this. So, my article says, okay, it's really hard to regulate prices, so maybe we should go back to Galbraith and allow countervailing power. So, I've proposed that we should allow what I call joint negotiation entities to get together and negotiate with firms that have market power.

Now, I cabin it in to deal with the critiques. So, I'm not gonna allow all the doctors in the country to get together. My joint negotiation entities have to be relatively small so that they don't have market power, and they can only get together and negotiate with firms on the other side that clearly do have market power.

To maintain innovation, I would not let them go after firms with monopoly power for the first five or six years, whatever it is. That would be an issue. And the relative concentration on each side would depend. Okay, yeah, that's a decision that's gotta be made.

Basically what you're saying is, Joe, sometimes cartels may be good. And I would say exactly, right? Some of these rules we have are not necessarily justified by decision theoretic economics, right? If we did, we probably wouldn't make all cartels per se illegal, but that's the way the law is.

We allow unions, we allow farm work, we allow farm co-ops.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Unions are exempt.

Steve Salop: I would call a cartel—

Joseph V. Coniglio: Yeah.

Steve Salop: —A joint negotiation entity that's got dominant bargaining power. So, if you can create just countervailing power where each side has moderate bargaining power, you don't wanna call that a cartel.

What I'm doing is I'm not allowing cartels.I'm getting away from the idea that any combination of competitors is a cartel.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Steve, I'm trying to end on a note of agreement here, and I think we do have a note of agreement. So, that.

Steve Salop: Just don't use the word cartel. Just don't use the word cartel. It confuses people. It's very confusing

Joseph V. Coniglio: It's kind of a cartel. But Steve I do just want to end on a sort of a lighter note. And I'm very grateful you mentioned our experience.

You were such a great professor, but you've had so many students over the years become prominent antitrust lawyers. And I know we discussed briefly on LinkedIn, you're not going to give us your top five, and that's totally fine. But maybe talk about some of the students you've had over the years.

Steve Salop: Yeah.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Have been a lot.

Steve Salop: I have had a lot. You know, in my antitrust course is not about antitrust at 30,000 feet. It's not about antitrust philosophy, because this is why I've been trying to avoid those questions with you today. It's not about, for the most part, where antitrust fits into society. I took as my goal when I started to be training antitrust lawyers, practitioners.

And that's worked. I've got a lot of them. I guess kinda the most famous ones for practitioners, Joe Simons was my student, chairman of the FTC. Christine Wilson, FTC commissioner, was my student. Joe Coniglio was my student. Among other kinda litigators, Matt Reilly was my student.

But boy, I knew from the get-go that he was gonna be a good litigator. Dan Culley, the rising star at Cleary. Rich Cunningham. I think I have former students who are the head of antitrust at several law firms. Bobby Lepore at Winston & Strawn. Alexander Lipschitz at Fried Frank.

There's at least one other. I've got students who have gone into academia. Laura Alexander, after a long career at Kirkland and at Cohen Milstein, teaching at Ohio State. Jennifer Sturiale after Cravath and Quinn Emanuel, she's teaching at Delaware. There have been really quite a few, really quite a few. It's kinda cool.

Joseph V. Coniglio: Yeah. I know we'd all say you're a great professor, Steve, and I think the proof is you got a couple right of center people in there too, right? Which means—

Steve Salop: Yeah

Joseph V. Coniglio: —maybe you weren't a good enough professor. I don't know. But I don't think that's the right interpretation.

Steve Salop: You can't control what your children or your students think. They have their own lives, and all you can do is make them smarter.

Joseph V. Coniglio: I certainly benefited in that regard from taking your course, and all of us who have read your articles over the years, you really are a treasure to the bar. Steve, it's been a real pleasure to have you on, and I want to thank everybody who tuned in to this really fun and, I think wide-ranging and insightful discussion.

Please stay tuned for next month's Schumpeter podcast, when we have another great antitrust luminary. And again, thanks to Steve Salop and for joining us, and everybody who listened. Appreciate it.

Steve Salop: Thanks a lot, Joe. It's been really fun.