Fiona M. Scott Morton (born 20 February 1967[1]) is an American economist who serves as the Theodore Nierenberg Professor at Yale School of Management.

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.

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.”[22] 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.

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.

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.

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.

[28] 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 was the Chair on the Subcommittee on Market Structure and Antitrust for the Stigler Committee on Digital Platforms at the University of Chicago, working on the question of the economic characteristics of digital platforms 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.

[29] 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.

[15] The article in the American Prospect was written by David Dayen, the journalist who labelled Scott Morton an antitrust crusader a year earlier.

[36] 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.

[36] 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.

[15] 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.

[38] The author and critic of monopoly power Zephyr Teachout called for Scott Morton to resign as the director of the Thurman Arnold Project.

In the period following the unsuccessful bid to run the Directorate General for Competition, Scott Morton has written several articles[40] and papers[41] in support of regulation of Apple and Amazon.

She has praised the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) because it forces Apple and Google "to share the technical specifications of their interfaces with developers and offer them the same functionalities they give to their own stores.

In the letter Morton stated: “Given the political controversy that has arisen because of the selection of a non-European to fill this position, and the importance that the Directorate General has the full backing of the European Union as it enforces, I have determined that the best course of action is for me to withdraw and not take up the chief economist position.”[45] Concerns about conflicts of interest of Scott Morton for the job of the Chief Economist of the Directorate General for Competition first emerged in May 2023.

"[51] French economist Jean Tirole stated that Europe was "very lucky to have drawn someone of her caliber," calling her a global leader "in the domain of industrial organization."

"[56] On July 17 a statement signed by 39 top competition experts, including Nobel Prize winner Bengt Holmstrom and French economist Olivier Blanchard, was distributed urging the EU to stick with Morton.

The Economist wrote in an opinion piece that the French push to oust Morton made “the EU look provincial" and "a continent lacking in economic dynamism" that might someday find it worth "importing" sound policymaking expertise.

"[44] In his "Digital Bridge" column, Politico writer Mark Scott pointed out that "her pre-emptive downfall had nothing to do with her qualifications" and that it is common for highly qualified economists to act as consultants for large firms.