Autori
Cass, Ronald A.
Hylton, Keith N.

Titolo
Preserving competition : economic analysis, legal standards and microsoft
Periodico
International Center for Economics Research, Torino. ICER - Working papers series
Anno: 1999 - Fascicolo: 15 - Pagina iniziale: 1 - Pagina finale: 43

Increasingly, government authorities charged with enforcement of antitrust (competition) laws appear inclined to accept the arguments of academic economists who are more skeptical of commercial markets and less skeptical of government markets than economists associated with the AChicago School.@ In the United States, the on-going case against Microsoft Corporation illustrates the influence of economists who see government as a relatively benign market policeman, able to nip and tuck around the edges to obtain just the right degree of competition in each market. Professor Steven Salop, a prominent member of the Anip-and-tuck@ school of antitrust analysis, in a recent article with Dr. Craig Romaine uses the Microsoft litigation to advance arguments central to this school=s credo. They argue that a wide variety of business behavior should be seen as potentially anticompetitive because those activities can raise the costs of business rivals and that antitrust law should be tailored more to assure limitations on potentially anticompetitive behavior than to avoid interference with businesses actually engaged in competition. We show that the Salop-Romaine arguments are misguided. They would dramatically expand the reach of antitrust law and would provide enormous discretion to decision makers who, following their arguments, could characterize an extraordinary array of ordinary business activities as violating antitrust strictures. Salop-Romaine=s fears about unregulated Anetwork markets@ are shown to rest on flawed analysis, even if such markets have the basic characteristics Salop and Romaine address. The vices they target generally will be subject to substantial mitigation through commercial markets, while the vices their approach would engender require correction through political markets that cannot be predicted to achieve favorable results. Indeed, their approach likely would exacerbate problems currently encountered in political markets. Fortunately, current law does not embody the standards contended for by Salop-Romaine and sympathetic economists.



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