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Choosing Among Antitrust Liability Standards Under Incomplete Information: Assessments Of And Aversions To The Risk Of Being Wrong, Barbara Ann White

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay analyzes the three papers presented on a panel I organized as chair of the AALS Antitrust Section entitled Evolving Antitrust Treatment of Dominant Firms for the 2005 Annual Meetings. Steve Salop’s and Doug Melamed’s papers recommend standards for government intervention while David McGowan argues why the government should not.

I create a framework within which to understand the three papers’ relationship to each other, by building on McGowan’s characterization of courts’ antitrust decisions. Since antitrust decisions are based on inherently incomplete real world information, they are subject to “error costs”: Courts are at risk of “false positives” (finding …