Cornerstone Research Named Outstanding Global Economic Firm

Margaret K. Kyle

Chair in Intellectual Property and Markets for Technology,
MINES ParisTech

Margaret Kyle is a noted authority on competition, intellectual property (IP), and innovation, with extensive multinational experience with life sciences and healthcare topics.

Professor Kyle has been retained as an expert witness in multiple matters and has significant testifying experience, including at trial. She has provided testimony on a range of issues, including damages related to alleged product misrepresentation, pricing of pharmaceutical products, and nascent competition. The global Women@Competition platform named Professor Kyle among forty notable women competition professionals in their forties. Global Competition Review recognized her to its inaugural list of the world’s most important antitrust academics.

In her academic work, Professor Kyle has examined the impact of antitrust, trade, and IP policies on R&D investment, innovation, and competition. In particular, Professor Kyle has substantive experience with issues related to pricing of pharmaceutical products, R&D productivity, new product distribution, and competition between branded and generic pharmaceutical products. In addition, she has written about antitrust merger enforcement issues in pharmaceutical markets, with applications to other dynamic markets characterized by innovation. In the context of COVID-19, she has analyzed how incentives can promote the development of new medical technologies and advance the rapid manufacture of tests and treatments.

Professor Kyle’s previous positions include visiting professor of strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Income and Productivity at the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; professor at the Toulouse School of Economics; assistant professor at the London Business School, Duke University, and Carnegie Mellon University; and visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong.

Professor Kyle consults to policy entities in the United States, Europe, and the UK on competition, economics, and innovation topics. She is a member of DG Competition’s Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy. At France’s Conseil National de Productivité, which advises the French Prime Minister and the Minister of Economic Affairs, she is one of eleven independent academic economists analyzing the country’s productivity and competitiveness, particularly issues linked to the Euro Zone. She coauthored a note on policies to encourage pharmaceutical innovation for France’s Conseil d’Analyse Économique. In the UK, Professor Kyle serves on the Research Committee for the Office of Health Economics.

Professor Kyle has coauthored chapters in the Handbook of Health Economics, the Oxford Handbook of the Economics of the Biopharmaceutical Industry, and Elsevier’s Encyclopedia of Health Economics. Her academic papers have been published in leading economics, strategy, and health policy journals. In 2024, Professor Kyle won a Concurrences Antitrust Writing Award for her coauthored article, “The Economics of New Product Launches and Access to Pharmaceutical Products in the EU.”

Professor Kyle is associate editor of the International Journal of Industrial Organization. She has been invited to speak at numerous conferences on issues such as nascent competition, reverse payment patent settlements, and excessive pricing.

Lorin M. Hitt

Zhang Jindong Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions,
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania;
Senior Advisor, Cornerstone Research

Lorin Hitt is an expert in applied econometrics who works on a broad range of antitrust, product liability, and intellectual property matters. He studies the role of information and information technology in pricing and product strategy decisions, competition, market structure, and consumer behavior.

Professor Hitt’s research focuses on how information and technology create economic value; how goods and services are priced; how competition works in information-intensive industries and online markets; and how consumers search and use information in their decision-making, among other topics. In his research, Professor Hitt utilizes a variety of empirical methods to estimate demand and supply, measure the effect of external events on market prices, and value individual product features in differentiated products.

Professor Hitt has substantial experience addressing class certification, damages, and liability issues. His expertise includes analyzing market data and evaluating proposed empirical methods such as hedonic price analyses, difference-in-differences regression analyses, and conjoint analyses. He has testified in high-profile antitrust, product liability, data privacy, data breach, and intellectual property matters, such as:

• Epic v. Apple, a matter involving Apple’s App Store, which Global Competition Review (GCR) recognized as its 2022 Matter of the Year and Litigation of the Year – Non-Cartel Defence
• Earl et al. v. Boeing and Southwest, in which the Fifth Circuit de-certified the proposed class on appeal
• Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” Litigation (Nemet et al. v. Volkswagen), in which the judge dismissed the case, finding the plaintiffs’ analyses to be unreliable and inadmissible due to critical flaws that Professor Hitt identified
• Johannessohn et al. v. Polaris Industries Inc.
• In Re TFT-LCD (Flat Panel) Antitrust Litigation
• Stragent LLC et al. v. Intel Corp.

Professor Hitt’s research has been published in leading economics and management journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Management Science, and Information Systems Research.

At the Wharton School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Hitt has taught courses on competition and customer pricing, information systems management, the economics of technology, and data analysis. He has won the annual Wharton Undergraduate Teaching Award more than ten times, and he has also been honored with the Wharton-wide Hauck Award and the University of Pennsylvania-wide Lindback Award for distinguished teaching.

Liam Colley

Senior Vice President

Liam Colley heads Cornerstone Research’s European competition practice. Mr. Colley is a testifying economics expert specializing in competition, antitrust damages, and economic regulation issues. He has more than twenty-five years of experience as a consultant and testifying expert. His experience includes multiple high-profile matters before U.K. and European Union courts and competition regulators. Citing the “unassailable quality of his work,” Lexology Index (Who’s Who Legal) has named Mr. Colley a leading competition economist, as well as a Thought Leader and Global Leader in the competition field.

Antitrust and competition

Mr. Colley has consulted on a range of competition matters before the European Commission, national competition authorities, regulators, and courts. His expertise includes matters arising in automotive; financial services; insurance; technology, media, and telecom (TMT); and transportation. He has supported clients on numerous antitrust investigations and market inquiries. In addition, Mr. Colley has worked on multiple mergers, particularly on matters involving efficiencies and failing firm defenses.

Antitrust damages

Mr. Colley has wide experience estimating damages that arise from breaches of competition rules. In cartel damages matters, he has prepared numerous expert reports in the context of high court litigation, arbitration, mediation, and settlement negotiations. He has addressed class action issues and worked on many stand-alone and follow-on actions in abuse of dominance cases.

Mr. Colley has served as a testifying expert before the U.K. High Court and the U.K. Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) on both antitrust damages matters and regulatory appeals.

Mr. Colley publishes and speaks widely on competition and damages issues. Before joining Cornerstone Research, for many years he led the global economics practice of a major professional consulting firm.