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. 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. Following her appointment, concerns were raised over her history of advising big U.S. technology companies such as Apple and Amazon, and that she was not a citizen of the E.U. But a group of 39 economists issued a statement supporting Scott Morton’s appointment. As a result of the controversy, Scott Morton withdrew from consideration in July 2023.
Starting in 2020, Scott Morton became the subject of controversies related to undisclosed payments from large corporations, while advising the US Congress and while nominated for a position to advise the EU on antitrust. As of early 2025, she was also a senior fellow at Bruegel.
Early life and education Scott Morton grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where she attended the public school system. 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.
Career 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.”
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."
Prominent research 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. 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 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 Scott Morton advised the US House Judiciary Committee in its 2019 probe of tech giants. She contributed to reports critical of Facebook and Google, while not disclosing that Apple and Amazon were her clients.
In 2020, the American Prospect magazine revealed that Scott Morton did not disclose consulting contracts with Apple and Amazon. The article in the American Prospect was written by David Dayen, the journalist who labelled Scott Morton an antitrust crusader a year earlier. Dayen reported that Scott Morton had herself revealed her apparently long-standing consulting work for Apple and consulting work for Amazon that had at that point lasted a year, in a panel where she spoke in 2020.
In another instance, Scott Morton authored an op-ed advocating against any initiatives to break up Big Tech, without disclosing her ongoing consulting work for Apple. In response, Scott Morton stated, “I work for companies that I’m comfortable are not breaking the law.”
At the time of the revelations on the undisclosed conflicts of interest, Scott Morton was the director of the Thurman Arnold Project at the Yale University. In the wake of the revelations about Scott Morton's undisclosed conflicts of interest, two fellows of the Thurman Arnold Project, Sanjukta Paul and Stacey Mitchell, resigned. Stacey Mitchell indicated that she resigned because Scott Morton's paid for advisory work for Apple and Amazon made it difficult for the project to achieve its objective and was at odds with the legacy of Thurman Arnold.