Professor Michael Noel is an expert in industrial organization, antitrust economics, and applied econometrics.
He has published more than forty articles on these topics, many of which have appeared in top economics journals. He was a pioneering contributor to the economics of multisided platforms. His work-market definition for two-sided platforms was cited by the US Supreme Court in its seminal antitrust decision in State of Ohio et al. vs. American Express. He has a PhD in economics from MIT.
Professor Noel has served as an economic expert on many litigation, merger, and other regulatory matters in the US and other jurisdictions. He has addressed issues including price fixing, market division, resale price maintenance, price discrimination, and monopolization. He has made important contributions as an academic and expert witness on antitrust issues in downstream gasoline markets, in particular on competitive pricing patterns that are often mistaken as evidence of antitrust infractions. In addition to publishing on industrial organization, he has taught antitrust economics courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels over the past twenty years.
Professor Noel also has extensive experience in evaluating product and geographic market definition and the potential for unilateral and coordinated effects in a wide variety of industries. He has advised industry and government on market definition and competitive effects in numerous merger reviews. He has taught and published research on advanced merger analysis methods including econometric merger simulations, merger simulation light, upward price pressure, critical loss analysis, SSNIP, and benchmarking methods, as well as the application of these methods to multisided markets.
Professor Noel has handled antitrust, merger, and other regulatory matters across industries including automobile manufacturing, banking, healthcare, online advertising, payments, pharmaceuticals, publishing, retail, and supermarkets.
Professor Noel is an empirical economist first and foremost and is skilled in applying cutting-edge statistical and econometric techniques to large and complex datasets. He is an expert in a wide range of predictive analytics applications, including demand forecasting and prediction, price and product optimization, consumer retention and efficiency analysis, and pattern search.
Professor Noel can be contacted by email through Howard Chang.
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD, Economics
University of Toronto
MA, Economics
BA, Economics, Statistics & Computer Science