Law Commons^™

Market Power And Antitrust Enforcement, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

Antitrust is back on the national agenda. The Democratic Party, leading Senators, progressive organizations, and many scholars are calling for stronger antitrust enforcement. One important step, overlooked in the discussion to date, is to reform how market power — an essential element in most antitrust violations — is determined. At present the very definition of market power is unsettled. While there is widespread agreement that market power is the ability to raise price profitably above the competitive level, there is no consensus on how to determine the competitive level. Moreover, courts virtually never measure market power (or its larger variant, …