Regulation and antitrust are key elements of government policy. This new edition of the leading textbook on government and business policy explains how the latest theoretical and empirical economic tools can be employed to analyze pressing regulatory and antitrust issues. The book departs from the common emphasis on institutions, focusing instead on the relevant underlying economic issues, using state-of-the-art analysis to assess the appropriate design of regulatory and antitrust policy. Extensive case studies illustrate fundamental principles and provide insight on key issues in regulation and antitrust policy.
A substantially revised and updated new edition of the leading text on business and government, with new material reflecting recent theoretical and methodological advances; includes further coverage of the Microsoft antitrust case, the deregulation of telecommunications and electric power, and new environmental regulations.
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This new edition of the leading text on business and government focuses on the insights economic reasoning can provide in analyzing regulatory and antitrust issues. Departing from the traditional emphasis on institutions, Economics of Regulation and Antitrust asks how economic theory and empirical analyses can illuminate the character of market operation and the role for government action and brings new developments in theory and empirical methodology to bear on these questions.
The fourth edition has been substantially revised and updated throughout, with new material added and extended discussion of many topics. Part I, on antitrust, has been given a major revision to reflect advances in economic theory and recent antitrust cases, including the case against Microsoft and the Supreme Court's Kodak decision. Part II, on economic regulation, updates its treatment of the restructuring and deregulation of the telecommunications and electric power industries, and includes an analysis of what went wrong in the California energy market in 2000 and 2001. Part III, on social regulation, now includes increased discussion of risk-risk analysis and extensive changes to its discussion of environmental regulation. The many case studies included provide students not only pertinent insights for today but also the economic tools to analyze the implications of regulations and antitrust policies in the future.The book is suitable for use in a wide range of courses in business, law, and public policy, for undergraduates as well at the graduate level. The structure of the book allows instructors to combine the chapters in various ways according to their needs. Presentation of more advanced material is self-contained. Each chapter concludes with questions and problems.
Since the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act (1897) and the Sherman Act (1890), regulation and antitrust (competition policy) have operated as competing mechanisms to control competition. Regulation produced cross-subsidies and favors to special interests, but specified prices and rules of mandatory dealing. Antitrust promoted competition without favoring special interests, but could not formulate rules for particular industries. Antitrust and regulation can be viewed as complements, where policymakers assign control of competition to courts or regulatory agencies based on their relative strengths. And antitrust may act as a constraint on what regulators can do. Controlling competition is a particular challenge in network industries, where mediating "vertical" interactions across firms, particularly for "bottleneck," or essential facilities, is important. This chapter uses a game theoretic framework of political bargaining and the historical record of antitrust and regulation across a number of regulated industries to explore both positive and normative rationales for choosing between these two policy instruments. It highlights the conditions under which competition policy and regulation may be complements rather than substitutes in the policy arsenal. The chapter argues that the deregulation movement reflected the relative competencies of antitrust and regulation, and describes the emergence of antitrust as the primary policy tool to control competition.
Federal antitrust laws apply to virtually all industries, including technology and healthcare, and to every aspect of business, including manufacturing, transportation, distribution, labor, and marketing. They prohibit a variety of practices that restrain trade, such as price-fixing conspiracies, corporate mergers whose effect may be to substantially lessen the competitive vigor of particular markets, interlocking directorates which create a risk of collusion, and predatory acts designed to achieve or maintain monopoly power.
The Division prosecutes certain violations of the antitrust laws by filing criminal cases that can lead to large fines and jail sentences. In other cases, the Division institutes a civil action seeking a court order forbidding future violations of the law and requiring steps to remedy the anticompetitive effects of past violations.
Many of the Division's accomplishments on these fronts are made possible by an unprecedented level of cooperation and coordination with federal enforcers, regulators, law enforcement agencies, state attorneys general, and foreign antitrust enforcement agencies.
Sometimes the Antitrust Division publishes guidance on the antitrust laws. These guidance documents are designed to explain to the American public, business community, practitioners, and courts the factors and frameworks the Antitrust Division considers when opening an investigation or bringing an enforcement action.
To that end, I want to continue the conversation I started with you last year about digital platforms and platform power. How do they work? How do they compete? How does market power play out? And what can and should be done to curb antitrust abuses?
At the Division, our analysis does not turn on whether a particular flawed label could describe the conduct at issue. Rather our focus is on whether the conduct by a firm with monopoly power has had or will likely have an exclusionary effect and cause competitive harm. This has been the heartland of antitrust caselaw and analysis for over 100 years.
Whether discriminatory conduct excludes competition for the platform, on the platform, or around the platform, or deepens the moat to insulate the platform from competition, the antitrust laws provide a mechanism for intervention.
The Antitrust Bureau is responsible for enforcing the antitrust laws to prevent anticompetitive practices and promote competition throughout the state. The bureau enforces New York's antitrust laws (Donnelly Act) and also has the authority to sue for violations of federal antitrust laws (Sherman and Clayton Acts).
Lawrence White has been with New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business for more than 45 years. His primary research areas of interest include financial regulation, antitrust, network industries, international banking and applied microeconomics.
Professor White has published numerous articles in the Journal of Business, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading journals in economics, finance, and law. He is the author of The S&L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation, among other books, and he is the co-editor (with John Kwoka) of the 7th of edition of The Antitrust Revolution. He contributed chapters to the NYU Stern books on the financial crisis - Restoring Financial Stability and Regulating Wall Street. He is the co-author (with Stern's Viral Acharya, Matthew Richardson, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh) of Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance. He co-edited and contributed to Stern's recent book Regulating Wall Street: CHOICE Act vs. Dodd-Frank.
From this point of view, regulation and antitrust are thrust upon unwilling producers in order to channel and redirect their behavior away from privately rational, but socially harmful ends. Business decisions motivated solely by the quest for profit are displaced by those of public policymakers who pursue broader objectives. Assigning greater weight to the interests of society as a whole, the antitrust and regulatory authorities act quickly and appropriately to correct the failures that seem to flourish in unfettered markets, thereby redistributing wealth back to consumers and enhancing economic efficiency.
Her research and teaching focus on industrial organization, competition policy, and the economics of regulation. Her published work includes analyses of antitrust law and economics, economic regulation, and firm behavior in a variety of transportation and energy markets, as well as of labor rent-sharing and determinants of executive pay. Her edited volume Economic Regulation and Its Reform: What Have We Learned? (NBER, 2014) describes the regulatory landscapes and lessons learned from deregulation and regulatory restructuring across eight broad industries, and the interplay of competition policy and economic regulation.
Antitrust laws were implemented to prevent companies from getting greedy and abusing their power. Without these regulations in place, many politicians fear that big businesses would gobble up the smaller ones. This would result in less competition and fewer choices for consumers, potentially leading to higher prices, lower quality, and less innovation, among other things.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) are responsible for making sure that antitrust laws are abided by. The FTC mainly focuses on segments of the economy where consumer spending is high, while the DOJ holds sole antitrust jurisdiction in sectors such as telecommunications, banks, railroads, and airlines and has the power to impose criminal sanctions.
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