Law Commons^™

Regulation And The Marginalist Revolution, Herbert Hovenkamp

Florida Law Review

The marginalist revolution in economics became the foundation for the modern regulatory State with its “mixed” economy. For the classical political economists, value was a function of past averages. Marginalism substituted forward looking theories based on expectations about firm and market performance. Marginalism swept through university economics, and by 1920 or so virtually every academic economist was a marginalist.

This Article considers the historical influence of marginalism on regulatory policy in the United States. My view is at odds with those who argue that marginalism saved capitalism by rationalizing it as a more defensible buttress against incipient socialism. While marginalism …

Vertical Mergers And Entrepreneurial Exit, D. Daniel Sokol

Florida Law Review

The idea that tech companies should be permitted to acquire nascent start-ups is under attack from antitrust populists. Yet, this debate on vertical mergers has overlooked important empirical contributions regarding innovation-related mergers in the strategy literature. This Article explores the extant empirical strategy literature, which generally identifies a procompetitive basis that supports vertical mergers as efficiency enhancing. This literature solidifies the current general vertical merger presumption that favors a procompetitive vertical merger policy for purposes of government merger enforcement. However, the procompetitive benefit for a presumption of merger approval for most vertical mergers does not end with the synthesis of …