Amazon & Digital Markets
WASHINGTON MONTHLY · APR 2026
How Amazon’s AI Algorithms Raise the Prices You Pay
Online price swings look like fierce competition. In reality, they’re part of an invisible strategy that steers the entire market upward.
THE ATLANTIC · FEB 2024
Amazon’s Big Secret
Nearly 30 years after its founding, Amazon still conceals where much of its profit comes from — a crucial question for understanding its monopoly power.
ILSR REPORT · DEC 2021
Amazon’s Toll Road
How Amazon uses the profits it extracts from independent sellers to finance predatory losses and expand its monopoly.
NEW YORK TIMES · OCT 2020
Don’t Let Amazon Get Any Bigger
A damning congressional report about Big Tech helps make the case to break up Jeff Bezos’ empire.
THE ATLANTIC · AUG 2020
Amazon Is a Private Government. Congress Needs to Step Up.
Reining in the tech giants will help restore American democracy.
ILSR REPORT · JUL 2020
Amazon’s Monopoly Tollbooth (with Zach Freed and Ron Knox)
How Amazon uses its gatekeeper power to extract steep fees from independent sellers, undermining their businesses and competition.
U.S. HOUSE · JUL 2019
Testimony on Amazon’s Dominance
Testimony on Amazon’s gatekeeper power that helped inform the Congressional investigation into Big Tech.
THE NATION · FEB 2018
Amazon Doesn’t Just Want to Dominate the Market—It Wants to Become the Market
The company is a radically new kind of monopoly with ambitions that dwarf those of earlier empires.
ILSR REPORT · NOV 2016
Amazon’s Stranglehold (with Olivia LaVecchia)
A foundational report that reframed Amazon as a monopoly and helped catalyze a broader public debate about the company’s power.
Local Economies
THE ATLANTIC · DEC 2024
The Great Grocery Squeeze
How a federal policy change in the 1980s created today’s food deserts.
ILSR VISUAL REPORT · NOV 2024
The Policy Shift That Decimated Local Grocery Stores
A visual history of how abandoning the Robinson-Patman Act fueled retail consolidation.
NEW YORK TIMES · MAY 2023
The Real Reason Your Groceries Are Getting So Expensive
How dominant buyers and supply chain coercion — not just inflation — drive up food costs for everyday shoppers.
ILSR REPORT · MAY 2023
The Dollar Store Invasion (with Susan Holmberg and Kennedy Smith)
How Dollar General and Dollar Tree use predatory expansion strategies that undermine local businesses and deepen food insecurity.
PROMARKET · FEB 2021
How the FTC Protected the Market Power of Pharmacy Benefit Managers (with Zach Freed)
Despite evidence that PBMs undermine competition and raise prescription prices, the FTC has discouraged states from regulating them.
WASHINGTON POST · FEB 2021
Small Pharmacies Beat Big Chains at Delivering Vaccines
Locally owned businesses often outperform national chains.
AMER. CONSERVATIVE · NOV 2019
How a Rebirth of Independent Pharmacies Could Cure Rural Ills (with Charlie Thaxton)
Independent pharmacies could flourish and help solve the problem of healthcare deserts — if only policymakers would stand up to the big players in the drug industry.
ANTITRUST BULLETIN · DEC 2016
The View from the Shop—Antitrust and the Decline of America’s Independent Businesses
How growing corporate concentration has undermined small businesses and entrepreneurship.
Antimonopoly Movement
PROMARKET · APR 2025
The Grassroots Revival of Anti-Monopoly Law Across America
States have become the new front lines of the antimonopoly movement.
THE ATLANTIC · DEC 2024
Lina Khan Goes Out With a Bang
The failed Kroger-Albertsons merger offers the clearest proof yet that the new antitrust movement is breaking through.
J. OF ANTITRUST · JUN 2023
Common Sense Returns to Antitrust
How an intellectual and political revolt brought down the Chicago School’s dominance of antitrust.
ILSR REPORT · JUN 2022
Rolling Back Corporate Concentration (with Ron Knox)
A policy roadmap for updating federal merger guidelines to restore competitive markets.
THE FORGE · MAR 2022
We Need a Popular Front to Overthrow Corporate Rule
Why small businesses are essential to building a political coalition capable of challenging corporate power.
NEW YORK TIMES · JUN 2021
Labor and Small Business Unite Against Monopoly
How a renewed alliance between labor and independent businesses could become a powerful force against corporate monopoly.
THE NATION · NOV 2020
Why the Left Should Ally With Small Business (with Susan Holmberg)
Recovering a forgotten New Deal alliance between workers and independent businesses to confront corporate monopoly.
THE NATION · FEB 2018
6 Ways to Rein In Today’s Monopolies
A practical policy guide for breaking up corporate concentration across key economic sectors.
THE ATLANTIC · JUN 2017
The Rise and Fall of the Word ‘Monopoly’ in American Life
How the word “monopoly” disappeared from American political discourse — and why its return matters.
Big-Box Swindle
The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses
BEACON PRESS · 2006
“A galvanizing eye-opener that deserves the widest possible audience… [It] illuminates a stunning collection of business outrages, government favoritism, environmental damages, hidden economic and societal costs, [and] debunked myths… Mitchell devotes the final quarter of her powerful book to… inspiring lessons from places that are turning the tide.” — Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which included Big-Box Swindle in its Top Ten 2006 list
“Mitchell has produced a compelling indictment of Wal-Mart and other ‘big box’ stores… [She] catalogues diverse ways indie-minded consumers can fight back, by campaigning against government subsidies to big-box stores and advocating for stronger antitrust enforcement.” — Publishers Weekly
“This is the ultimate account of the single most important economic trend in our country.” — Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature