John Asker

John Asker is a leading expert in industrial organization and antitrust and competition economics. Professor Asker focuses on topics related to antitrust policy, cartel behavior, vertical restraints, auction design, firm-level productivity, industry subsidy effects, artificial intelligence (AI) pricing mechanisms, and cryptocurrency. He also has experience with issues at the intersection of financial markets and antitrust.

Professor Asker has testified in numerous high-profile matters, including mergers and civil litigation.

Professor Asker was retained by Amazon in its $8.5 billion acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which Global Competition Review named as 2023 Matter of the Year. Counsel for Meta retained him to assess competitive effects in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) review of Meta’s $1 billion acquisition of Kustomer. He was retained by counsel for SoftBank and Sprint Corporation in the $26 billion T-Mobile/Sprint merger. Professor Asker provided written testimony to the World Trade Organization on behalf of the Canadian government in the U.S.–Canada softwood lumber dispute.

Professor Asker has served as an economic consultant to both federal and state regulatory agencies. In the AT&T/DirecTV merger, he served as an expert for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The U.S. Department of Justice retained him to evaluate potential competitive effects of the then-proposed merger between Dow Chemical Co. and DuPont. He has coauthored several amicus briefs presented before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate courts.

Professor Asker has provided testimony, in depositions and at trial, in multiple civil litigation matters. In EFN West Palm Motor Sales LLC v. Hyundai Motor America Corp. et al., a federal trial, his testimony on vertical relations between a manufacturer and dealers contributed to the jury ruling in favor of Hyundai and awarding no damages. Professor Asker has also testified in cases alleging exclusionary conduct, cartel behavior, price discrimination, and predatory trading. He has been retained in antitrust matters involving financial markets to address issues of alleged collusion and price manipulation.

Professor Asker has conducted extensive research on cartels, including their structure and operation, aggregate market power impact, related economic damages, and implications for antitrust policy. He has contributed research on cartels and collusion to leading economics reference texts, notably the Handbook of Industrial Organization. He has also published in leading journals on vertical restraints.

Professor Asker is an editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has also held editorial positions at the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Industrial Economics. His research has been published in leading economics journals, including the Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Review.

Who’s Who Legal has named Professor Asker as a leading competition economist, as well as a Thought Leader and Future Leader in the competition field. Global Competition Review recognized him to its inaugural list of the world’s most important antitrust academics. The Australian government appointed Professor Asker to a Competition Task Force Advisory Panel that oversees changes to Australia’s competition laws.

Professor Asker teaches courses in antitrust policy, industrial organization, and strategy. He also speaks on antitrust topics, including to U.S. federal agencies, and has been a visiting scholar at the FTC’s Bureau of Economics, the Department of Economics at Harvard, and Yale Law School. Before joining the UCLA faculty, Professor Asker was an associate professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University.