Thought Leaders

Dr Frederick R (Rick) Warren-Boulton is a senior managing director at Ankura, based in Washington, DC. He is an internationally recognised economics expert in the fields of antitrust and industrial organisation, particularly in the economics of vertical restraints, mergers, price fixing, exclusion and monopolisation, and has testified and published extensively on those issues. Rick served for six years as chief economist of the antitrust division of the US Department of Justice, first as director of its economic policy office and then as the first deputy assistant attorney general for economic analysis, before co-founding MiCRA, an economic consulting firm specialising in applied microeconomic theory, industrial organisation and econometrics, in 1991. He is a former associate professor of economics at Washington University (St Louis), a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a research professor of psychology at American University.

Rick has served as the testifying expert for private parties and for various government agencies on landmark monopolisation cases such as US v AT&T and US v Microsoft, as well as merger challenges such as FTC v Staples and Office Depot and US v H&R Block.

He has also published and consulted extensively on price-fixing and other restrictive or collusive agreements. At the DOJ, he was a primary author of the US sentencing guidelines for criminal antitrust offences such as price-fixing and market allocation and has lectured and written on related issues such as optimal fines, penalties and leniency. Since leaving the DOJ, he has provided economic analysis and econometric estimates of harm for private parties negotiating fines and penalties with the DOJ and with antitrust agencies in Canada, the EU, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. He has also been the expert for liability and damages in a number of class action and opt-out cases in the US involving price fixing or market allocation, including for the defendants in recent cases involving air cargo, car carriers, parcel shipping, auto parts and capacitors.