Welfare Economics and Antitrust Policy - Vol. I

Book excerpt: This book is Volume I of a two-volume set on antitrust policy, analyzing the economic efficiency and moral desirability of various tests for antitrust legality, including those promulgated by US and EU antitrust law. The overall study consists of three parts. Part I (Chapters 1-8) introduces readers to the economic, moral, and legal concepts that play important roles in antitrust-policy analysis. Part II (Chapters 9-16) analyzes the impacts of eight types of conduct covered by antitrust policy and various possible government responses to such conduct in terms of economic efficiency, the securing of liberal moral rights, and the instantiation of various utilitarian, non-utilitarian-egalitarian, and mixed conceptions of the moral good. Part III (Chapters 17-18) provides detailed information on US antitrust law and EU competition law, and compares the extent to which—when correctly interpreted and applied—these two bodies of law could ensure economic efficiency, protect liberal moral rights, and instantiate various morally defensible conceptions of the moral good. This first volume contains Part I and the first two chapters of Part II of the overall study—the two chapters that focus on oligopolistic and predatory conduct of all kinds, respectively. The book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students of economics and law who are interested in welfare economics, antitrust legality and the General Theory of the Second Best.