An Alternative Focus for Antitrust: Addressing Harmful Competitive Advantage

This paper suggests that antitrust authorities should focus on harmful competitive advantages. These are largely Porterian and Smithian advantages created by firms seeking to disadvantage rivals, governments inadvertently hindering competition, and governments protecting favored stakeholders and partisans without corresponding improvements in economic efficiency. The proposed approach is intended to enable antitrust to get to the heart of market power rather than address symptoms, address market power concerns in dynamic situations, and to make up for antitrust's tendency to ignore competition problems created by governments. This approach would reorient some antitrust resources away from investigating and prosecuting cases and towards investigations that identify problems and develop solutions before harms occur.