Law Commons^™

Ethnically Segmented Markets, Felix B. Chang

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Races often collide in segmented markets where buyers belong to one ethnic group while sellers belong to another. This Article examines one such market: the retail of wigs and hair extensions for African Americans, a multi-billion-dollar market controlled by Korean Americans. Although previous scholarship attributed the success of Korean American ventures to rotating credit and social capital, this Article ascribes their dominance in wigs and extensions to collusion and exclusion, tactics scrutinized under antitrust.

This Article is the first to synthesize the disparate treatment of ethnically segmented markets in law, sociology, and economics into a comprehensive framework. Its primary contribution …