This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

We model merger control procedures as a process of sequential acquisition of information in which mergers can be cleared after a first phase of investigation. We find that the enforceability of clearance decisions at the end of the first phase is unattractive to the extent that it prevents the...

Since the 1970’s, there has been a progression toward market processes in nations once committed to comprehensive central economic planning. Multinational donors and individual Western countries have expended substantial resources to advise these nations about legal reforms designed to promote...

Causation is one of the most underexplored areas in antitrust law. What must a plaintiff show to connect a defendant’s conduct with anticompetitive effects? Several tests are possible, including “but for” causation, proximate cause, sole causation, reasonable connection, and increased...

This essay is the introduction to a forthcoming volume entitled, Regulating Innovation: Competition Policy and Patent Law Under Uncertainty (Cambridge U. Press 2009 forthcoming). In addition to introducing all of the papers in the volume, this essay introduces the organizing themes of the...

Commissioner Kovacic of the US Federal Trade Commission has stated that “consumer protection laws are important complements to competition policy.” According to the UK Office of Fair Trading, “[c]ompetition and consumer policy are interdependent”; together they “provide a framework for...

Should antitrust law ever sanction the accumulation of market power or permit other restraints of trade if such conduct would increase social welfare? This is the challenge raised by intramarket second-best tradeoffs. In the presence of multiple market failures, it is conceivable that mergers or...

Antitrust originated in popular resistance to 17th century Royal Grants and 19th century economic power. This article contends that much of the guiding force of today's antitrust policy stems from these early sentiments, applied to thoroughly different legal and economic circumstances....

The present paper analyzes the interaction between the economic review of the probition of abuses of a dominant position (Article 82 EC) on the one hand and the efforts to enhance private enforcement of competition law through private damage claims on the other hand. The paper argues that...

In modern antitrust law, intellectual and other forms of property have been treated symmetrically as a matter of principle. Recent actions by the Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, however, sound a departure from this salutary principle of symmetry. In...