Suchergebnisse

The consumer welfare standard in antitrust has been heavily criticized. But would, in fact, abandoning the "consumer welfare" standard make the antitrust law too unworkable and indeterminate? I argue that there is such a thing as a post-consumer welfare antitrust that is practicable and arguably as predictable as the consumer welfare standard. In practice, the consumer welfare standard has not set a high bar. The leading alternative standard, the "protection of competition" is at least as predictable, and arguably more determinate than the exceeding abstract abstract consumer welfare test, while being much truer the legislative intent underlying the antitrust laws. More concretely, we should return to asking, in most antitrust cases, the following question: Given a suspect conduct (or merger): Is this merely part of the competitive process, or is it meant to "suppress or even destroy competition?" This standard actually already forms a part of antitrust doctrine. What changes is eliminating "consumer welfare" as a final or necessary consideration in every case.

This article focuses on two aspects of the real or imagined conflict between welfarism and consumerism; whether the experience of being a welfare user is somehow changed by living in a society in which people may see themselves less as workers and more as consumers; and whether the providers of welfare services and benefits can or should treat their users more like consumers than beneficiaries or even citizens with welfare rights.

The purpose of this paper is to show that export cartels are not necessarily harmful for consumers in the importing countries. Using the strategic trade policy model of Brander and Spencer (1985a), we show that, contrary to the harmful effect, product-market cooperation benefits consumers by affecting the trade policies. We further show that consumers in the importing countries are affected adversely if cooperation is among the governments of the exporting countries, instead of the exporting firms.

The “merger guidelines” that have been published by the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice since 1969–with updates happening every 10-15 years–serve an unusual role. They are not federal regulations like, say, rules about what level of pollutants can be emitted from the Environmental Protection Administration. Instead, the merger guidelines seek to … Continue reading Antitrust and the Consumer Welfare Goal
The post Antitrust and the Consumer Welfare Goal first appeared on Conversable Economist.