Introduction

Abstract

The concept of market power is clearly of central importance in any discussion of antitrust economics and merits serious attention at the outset of this survey. As with so many important economic concepts, the closer our scrutiny, the more elusive and intangible the concept appears to be. Small wonder, perhaps, that so many recent antitrust contributions sidestep the conceptual issue and proceed as if market power were a simply identifiable state of the world. In essence, market power exists when a specific firm (or group of firms acting in combination) has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other firms (or individual consumers) shall have access to it. However, there are many problems to be overcome before this concept can be rendered operational for empirical research.