Early career 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.
Department of Justice In May 2011 Scott Morton took public service leave from Yale to serve as 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.
Relation to Chicago School economics Scott Morton's views depart from assumptions posited by the “
Chicago School” of antitrust. 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.” 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 relationships, and ecommerce platforms. The platform requires that the business users in its network desist from offering their products or services at a lower price (or with 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. Such “horizontal shareholding” or “common ownership” may lessen competition because the same owner of, for example, Coke and Pepsi would benefit from higher prices in the market. In 2019, Scott Morton and her co-authors Shapiro and Giulio Federico wrote an article titled “Antitrust and Innovation: Welcoming and Protecting Disruption” in which they discussed the importance of innovation competition, reiterating its importance in generating consumer welfare. In the same year Scott Morton and her coauthors Jonathan Baker,
Nancy Rose, and Steve Salop authored an article for the journal
Antitrust called “Five Principles for Vertical Merger Enforcement Policy.” In 2019, Scott Morton led a group of eight economists in study for the Stigler Center at the
University of Chicago, which resulted in a report recommending the creation of a new regulating body that could supplement traditional antitrust regulators by moving more quickly to maintain competition in online industries. In 2019, Scott Morton began her leadership of the Thurman Arnold Project, named after an influential Yale law professor who, in the 1940s, established the modern form of the Antitrust Division and popularized enforcement. On April 30, 2020, Scott Morton and 11 other well-known economists authored an open letter to the
House Judiciary Committee outlining the legal developments that limit the success of meritorious antitrust plaintiffs, both in merger challenges and exclusionary conduct. The letter called on Congress to implement strong antitrust reform in the United States. In the spring of 2020, Scott Morton and David Dinielli authored three “roadmap” articles relying on public information and facts released by the Competition and Markets Authority in the UK. These articles explained the economics underlying the conduct of Facebook. Google Search, and Google ad tech, The articles argue that in each of those three instances, a viable antitrust case could be brought under existing law. In 2021 Scott Morton and Steven Salop in an article titled “The 2010 HMGs After Ten Years: Where Do We Go From Here?” warned of problems arising from mergers that generate a Gross Upward Pricing Pressure Index (GUPPI) of greater than 10% and proposed reversing the increase in the
Herfindahl-Hirschman index thresholds made in the 2010 guidelines. In 2021 Scott Morton and
Susan Athey co-authored a paper titled "Platform Annexation." The paper illustrated a series of strategies digital platforms use to disadvantage rival firms and maintain their own position as market leaders. ==Undisclosed conflict of interest controversy==