Illinois Tech’s Liad Wagman Wins International Antitrust Writing Award

Liad Wagman, the John and Mae Calamos Dean Endowed Chair at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business, has been named winner of the Best Antitrust Academic Article, General Antitrust Category, in the 2024 Antitrust Writing Awards.

The award recognizes “Towards a Technological Overhaul of American Antitrust,” an article co-authored by Wagman, Professor of Economics Ginger Zhe Jin at the University of Maryland, College Park, and D. Daniel Sokol, the Carolyn Craig Franklin Chair in Law and Business at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

The annual Antitrust Writing Awards aim to promote scholarship about competition and contribute to competition advocacy in the legal and economic fields internationally. The selection and presentation of awards is organized by Concurrences, an independent legal publisher dedicated to antitrust law and competition economics, and the George Washington University Law School’s Competition Law Center.

The jury that selected the winning articles, from more than 600 articles reviewed, is composed of leading antitrust enforcers, academics, and in-house counsel from government agencies, universities, and corporations around the world. Winning authors were honored at the Antitrust Writing Awards Ceremony on April 9 in Washington, D.C.

In their winning article, published in the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Magazine, Wagman, Jin, and Sokol write that the informational infrastructure within the United States antitrust system lags far behind the development of the digital economy, which leaves federal antitrust agencies improperly equipped to organize and operationalize knowledge for enforcement and policymaking. The authors make the case that the agencies need to acquire the staffing, expertise, and cutting-edge digital technology that will enable them to fully leverage data analytics in support of their missions. In addition, the authors propose that antitrust agencies reorient their processes and approach in order to enhance competition advocacy and foster better functioning marketplaces.

Wagman has conducted extensive research in areas such as antitrust, market competition, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and innovation, including leading a major United States Federal Trade Commission study of M&A by the five largest tech companies in 2021 when he was serving as senior economic and technology adviser at the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning.