Acknowledgments
If anyone you know has ever written a book, you know that authors require a certain amount of indulgence. They also require at least a few proofreaders to remind them that discretion is often the better part of valor.
Though the list of those who have endured my brainstorming is too long to enumerate, I would like to thank the smaller list of friends and colleagues who read portions of earlier drafts and helped me get the final manuscript into place: Joe Bernstein, Jeff Itell, Cathy Johnston, and Miranda Xafa. Several anonymous reviewers also provided useful feedback.I would also like to thank Charles River Associates Incorporated, where I was a consultant from 1998 to 2000, a Principal from 2000 to 2003, and which I recently rejoined as a consultant. CRA is a worldclass economic consulting firm that respects academic-style analytic thinking while providing its clients with valuable expertise and advice. More to the point, my affiliation with CRA gave me the privilege of getting to know some of the world’s best industrial organization economists and antitrust specialists.
That said though, every idea and opinion expressed in this book is mine and is not to be construed or deemed the opinion or position of CRA or any of its employees, officers, directors, or consultants. Nor, for that matter, should anyone attribute any of my ideas to any organization, any individual collaborator, or any client with whom I may have worked in the past or may work in the future.
The expressions of my ideas are also original. In some cases, I found previous authors who already said what I wanted to say in ways better than I could say it. In those cases, I quoted the previous authors—always with attribution. I also excerpted lyrics from several popular songs. I would have liked to have excerpted more lyrics, but most of the copyright owners attempted to impose unacceptable restrictions on me in exchange for allowing me to quote the words that they own. I would therefore like to thank the Grateful Dead’s Ice Nine Publishing Company and Tori Amos’s Sword and Stone Publishing Company, for allowing me to simply quote their lyrics. If you like Digital Phoenix, you’ll love their music. If you don’t like Digital Phoenix, you’ll love their music anyway.
Finally, I couldn’t have turned my manuscript into a book without the support of my agent, Susan Schulman, and a superb editorial team at The MIT Press: John Covell, Yan Ho, and Mel Goldsipe. Erin Hasley, also of The MIT Press, took the lead in preparing the truly funky design on the book jacket. Their contributions were both indispensable and greatly appreciated.