Fiona Scott Morton

Fiona M. Scott Morton (born 20 February 1967 ) is an American economist who serves as the Theodore Nierenberg Professor at Yale School of Management.

Her research in industrial organization has covered industries including magazines, shipping, pharmaceuticals, and internet retail.

According to Scott Morton, "The Chicago School colonized the field in the 1980s. Few in the judiciary or enforcement communities wanted to vigorously enforce the antitrust laws. The Chicago folks made that worse by using [decades-old] economics, which conveniently left out many of the tools you need to get the job done properly.”

The Chicago School places great weight on the ability of entrants to enter and overthrow an established incumbent regardless of entry barriers, scale economies, network effects and the like, resulting in markets operating at peak efficiency without any need for enforcement.

Similarly, little enforcement is needed in mergers either because they are assumed to generate great efficiencies.

By contrast, Scott Morton stresses that even very simple models of competition illustrate the incentive for monopolists become established and remain entrenched in the absence of enforcement; and for capitalism to work and benefit regular consumers there must be “rules of the road.”

According to her sometime co-author Steve Salop, Scott Morton is a leading figure in the so-called "post-Chicago" group that has forged "a coherent body of work that can be used by policymakers and advocates.”

According to Scott Morton, “The economic tool kit lets you say, 'Look here, I have identified a new competition problem that is harming consumers.' A lawyer’s response is often, 'That’s a new product, market, or problem.

It doesn’t fit existing precedent and we don’t know how to use our legal tools to challenge it.' I realized that very few people in the policy world thought that fixing that second step was their job.

Nor did academics."

Scott Morton has expressed her frustration with the “cramped” thinking on competition topics that has prevailed during the 1980-2010 period.

Entering a field in which government representatives reflexively touted the importance of moderation, Scott Morton rapidly became known as an advocate for bold action in the pursuit of anticompetitive measures.

She graduated from Yale in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in economics (spending a year abroad at Clare College, Cambridge) and then went on to get a Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1994.

Scott Morton’s first academic job was at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she worked for three years before moving the Chicago Graduate School of Business (now known as Booth).

In 1999 she became an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Management, where she has taught ever since.

She was promoted to Full Professor in 2003, has served as Associate Dean, and has won the Yale School of Management’s Alumni Association Elective Teaching Award three times.

She served as associate dean of the Yale School of Management from 2007 to 2010.

From 2011 to 2012, she served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics at the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

In her academic work, she has advocated for the U.S. government's role in ensuring healthy competition in healthcare markets and the tech industry.

Scott Morton is a consultant to the competition practice at the economics consulting firm CRA International in parallel with work as professor.

Scott Morton is the director of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale.

She was appointed Chief Economist of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition, an appointment that was supposed to take effect on September 1, 2023.

However, some European Commission officials, the European Parliament political groups of Renew Europe, the European People's Party, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and the Greens/European Free Alliance, as well as French ministers Catherine Colonna and Jean-Noël Barrot requested that the commission reconsider the appointment because of the conflicts of interest arising of her history of advising US big tech companies, including a former controversy of failing to disclose that Apple and Amazon were among her clients, and because she was not a citizen of the European Union.

Some economists however spoke out in favour of Morton over her credentials.

As a consequence of the controversy, Scott Morton withdrew from the position.

Scott Morton grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where she attended the public school system.

In May 2011 Scott Morton took public service leave from Yale to be Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis for the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice.

In this position she oversaw a team of almost fifty economists to investigate mergers, analyze monopolization cases, and carry out competition policy work.

During that time the Antitrust Division blocked the merger between H&R Block and TaxAct as well as AT&T and T-Mobile.

The AnheiserBusch-GrupoModelo merger, which resulted in the divestiture of the US operations of GrupoModelo, and the Apple-eBooks case started while Scott Morton was chief economist.

Scott Morton’s views depart from assumptions posited by the “Chicago School” of antitrust.

Scott Morton's influential 2014 paper "Strategic Patent Acquisitions," co-authored with Carl Shapiro, explains that when Standard Setting Organizations (technical bodies that gather to set standards like 4G) allow the exercise of market power by the patents needed in the standard (SEPs) they are effectively an anticompetitive cartel that could be disciplined by antitrust enforcement.

In 2017, in "A Unifying Analytical Framework for Loyalty Rebates," which appeared in Antitrust Law Journal, Scott Morton and Zachary Abrahamson explained that loyalty discounts and rebates may potentially run afoul of antitrust statutes because they explicitly exclude a challenger who is growing and stealing share from the incumbent.

The authors developed a metric called “effective entrant burden” to measure the degree to which a firm leverages its non-contestable assets into anti-competitive exclusion.

In 2018, in the Yale Law Journal, Scott Morton and Jonathan B. Baker authored a paper titled “The Antitrust Case Against Platform MFNs” in which they took up "platform MFN" status as a topic of potential antitrust enforcement attention.

Platform MFNs, sometimes called pricing parity provisions, are often seen in hotel-online travel agent relationships, healthcare provider-insurer relationship, and ecommerce platforms.

The platform requires that the business users in its network not offer their products or services at a lower prices (or better terms) on their own sites or on other platforms.

The authors review the long economics literature showing that these arrangements cause higher prices and block entry, and argue that the Sherman Act might well be used to challenge them.

In the same issue of the Yale Law Journal, Scott Morton and Herbert Hovenkamp contributed a paper, "Horizontal Shareholding and Antitrust Policy," in which they argued that large institutional investors who hold stakes in direct competitors pose a competition problem than could be addressed by antitrust enforcement.

Starting 2020, Scott Morton's reputation was marred by repeated controversies related to secret payments that the professor received from large corporations, while advising the US Congress and later when attempting to advise the EU on antitrust.