Structuralism in Competition Policy
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
10-1-2014
Abstract
The immediate impact of marginalist economics was profound distrust in markets, which by the 1930s were regarded as differing widely from one another and prone to failure. First was a period in which collusion or monopoly seemed inevitable in many industries. Then came the era of monopolistic competition, which viewed firms as distinguished mainly by product differentiation rather than price, was suspicious of intellectual property rights, and saw prices as too high and output too low. In the 1950s economists developed one of the most durable, most tested, and eventually most vilified theories of competition policy: structuralism, or the view that one could determine economic performance by measuring the number of firms in a market and difficulty of new entry. Until it collapsed in the 1970s, structuralism provided the one thing that antitrust policy had lacked, namely, simple and robust-sounding answers to complex questions of merger law and anticompetitive practices.
Keywords
antitrust, merger, monopolistic competition, Structuralism, anticompetitive practices
Publication Title
The Opening of American Law: Neoclassical Legal Thought, 1870-1970
Repository Citation
Hovenkamp, Herbert, "Structuralism in Competition Policy" (2014). Book Chapters. 61.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_chapters/61
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199331307.003.0012
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199331307.003.0012