Kevin Harriott was appointed to the post of Competition Bureau Chief in July 2005. As head of the Competition Bureau, he participates in the planning, direction and management of the Fair Trading Commission and his responsibilities includes providing the Government and the public with economic analyses of market processes as they relate to antitrust, consumer protection and regulation.
In 1996, Kevin completed a Bachelor’s degree as a Statistics major at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) where he delivered the valedictory address. After completing a Master’s degree in Economics in 1998 at UWI, he worked in the Research and Economic Programming Division of the Bank of Jamaica for two years before pursuing further graduate studies in the United States of America. He graduated from Texas A&M University in August 2005 with a doctoral degree in Economics. His research interests include information economics and product differentiation, having specialized in the field of Industrial Organization. His dissertation entitled “Advertising and Consumer Search in Differentiated Markets,” is a theoretical demonstration of the extent to which consumers’ ignorance about a product’s characteristics may be exploited by firms to acquire market power through the legitimate use of advertisements. (ILM).