Industrial Organization, Antitrust, and Public Policy

✍ Scribed by Alfred E. Kahn (auth.), John V. Craven (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1983
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 267
• Series: Middlebury Conference Series on Economic Issues
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book contains a selection of the papers presented at the third annual Middlebury College Conference on Economic Issues, held in April, 1981. The theme of the conference was "Industrial Organization and Public Policy. '' It is perhaps testimony to the complexity of our industrial structure that thirty years have passed without legislative action on antitrust even as the field of industrial organization has been heavily mined by scholars. Evidence that Congress prefers a hands-off policy seems now stronger than ever. This book seeks to present analyses and assessments that would aid the reader in judging the correctness of such public policy. Alfred Kahn, in Part I, questions whether scholars whose concerns lie in the field of industrial organization can contribute significant insights to the major problems of the day - inflation, declining productivity, rising costs of resources, and income allocation. Although the paper following is not a direct response to Professor Kahn's skepticism, Willard Mueller presents in it a lively attack on those who discount the importance of an activist antitrust policy. Given the rather sharply contrasting views of Professors Mueller and Kahn, Oliver Williamson's contribution is an op­ portune perspective of where antitrust enforcement has been in the past two decades, and where it is going in the 1980s. Part I concludes with David Audretsch's assessment of the effectiveness of the enforcement of our merger law, followed by Robert Smith's proposal that we tie antitrust action more closely and more logically to macro stabilization policies.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-viii
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
The Relevance of Industrial Organization....Pages 3-17
The Anti-Antitrust Movement....Pages 19-40
Antitrust Enforcement: Where it has been; Where it is Going....Pages 41-68
An Evaluation of Horizontal Merger Enforcement....Pages 69-88
Toward a Broader Concept of Competition Policy....Pages 89-105
Front Matter....Pages 107-107
The Notion of a Critical Region of Concentration: Theory and Evidence....Pages 109-128
Industrial Organization and Technological Change: Recent Econometric Findings....Pages 129-143
Concentration and Performance in Local Retail Markets....Pages 145-161
Front Matter....Pages 163-163
Economies of Scale and Monopoly Profits....Pages 165-204
Front Matter....Pages 205-205
Micro Determinants of Conglomerate Mergers....Pages 207-241
The Incidence of Price Changes in the U. S. Economy....Pages 243-266
Back Matter....Pages 267-267

✦ Subjects

Industrial Organization