Abstract
Antitrust policy — also referred to often as competition policy — is an important instrument for shaping public policy toward business. Industry regulation, antidumping enforcement, and industrial policy (such as infant industry subsidies) are three other instruments. As compared with these, antitrust/competition policy is the least influenced by objectives other than economic efficiency. One of the reasons is that antitrust applies to economic organization quite generally, whereas other instruments are often industry-specific and invite lobbying as well as a parallel (industry-specific) government bureaucracy, which poses revolving door concerns. Moreover, although economics does not speak with one voice to the issues, there is widespread agreement over what the antitrust tradeoffs are and courts have adopted economic analysis to provide a theoretical foundation for evaluating antitrust concerns. The upshot is that although purely economic arguments are not determinative in antitrust, economics has a great deal to offer in shaping how we should interpret ‘problematic’ firm and market behaviour.
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© 2002 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Gilbert, R., Williamson, O. (2002). Antitrust Policy. In: Newman, P. (eds) The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-74173-1_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-74173-1_19
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