Law and Economics Commons^™

A Micro-Microeconomic Approach To Antitrust Law: Games Managers Play, Harry S. Gerla

Michigan Law Review

If we are to gain an accurate perspective on the impact of antitrust laws and policies on the behavior of firms in the real world, we must adopt a micro-microeconomic approach which focuses not on how rational, profit-maximizing firms will theoretically behave, but upon how late twentieth-century American managers and executives actually behave. This article attempts to begin that task.

Part I of this article examines the justifications for focusing on individual managers rather than profit-maximizing firms as the key actors in antitrust law. Part II looks at contemporary management mores and practices and develops some generalized "rules of the …

Workable Antitrust Policy, Frank H. Easterbrook

Michigan Law Review

One of the schools of thought in the economics of antitrust was called "workable competition." The adherents to this school believed that markets were prone to cartelization and that concentration was death on competition, but that occasionally competition might prove "workable." These scholars were suspicious of almost every industrial practice they saw. One of the manifestations of their work came to be known as the "structure-conduct-performance paradigm." The thesis was that you could tell whether competition was feasible from the structure of the market. If the top four firms had fifty percent or so of the sales, we should abandon …

Consumer Beware Chicago, Eleanor M. Fox

Michigan Law Review

Professor Hovenkamp's article, Antitrust Policy After Chicago, reveals an important truth. Chicago School economics does not provide a superior roadmap to efficiency. I would take the critique one step further and assert: The main gap between Chicago and its critics is not even the design of the roadmap to efficiency. The main gap is social and political philosophy.

Rhetoric And Skepticism In Antitrust Argument, Herbert Hovenkamp

Michigan Law Review

In his essay on Workable Antitrust Policy Judge Easterbrook professes an extraordinary skepticism about economic models in general, and particularly about the ability of courts to use economic models to distinguish the competitive from the anticompetitive. But a profession of skepticism is itself a very powerful rhetorical device; it creates a perception of tough-mindedness, of refusal to yield real-world observations to analytic models or other abstractions, of extreme reluctance to accept any proposition that has not been clearly proven. Further, it is always very easy to be a skeptic, because every position ever taken except perhaps for a few tautologies …

Least Cost Approaches For Satisfying Water Demand: An Alternatives Analysis, Zach Willey

Western Water: Expanding Uses/Finite Supplies (Summer Conference, June 2-4)

27 pages.

Contains references.

Agenda: Western Water: Expanding Uses/Finite Supplies, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

Western Water: Expanding Uses/Finite Supplies (Summer Conference, June 2-4)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors James N. Corbridge, Jr., Lawrence J. MacDonnell and David H. Getches.

This conference featured luncheon talks by Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm and Undersecretary of the Department of the Interior Ann McLaughlin. The conference attracted 115 registrants from 19 states plus the District of Columbia.

The Un-Easy Case For Technological Optimism, James E. Krier, Clayton P. Gillette

Articles

"Technological optimism" is a term of art, an article of faith, and a theory of politics. It is a view that pervades modem attitudes, yet gets little explicit attention. For a brief period the situation was otherwise. In the early 1970s, the optimistic outlook figured prominently in an important debate about nothing less than the future of the world. Technological optimism won. The outcome was unsurprising, given the nature of the argument. On one side of the debate was a group of self-proclaimed Malthusians who foresaw an impending period of stark scarcity unless relatively drastic remedial steps were quickly taken; …

The Legalization Of American Society: Economic Regulation, Peter O. Steiner

Michigan Law Review

My central thesis is that regulation may be insightfully classified into three broad types of response to perceived market failure, and I will merely touch examples of each. The first is protection of competitive results. I shall focus on natural monopoly regulation, although anti-trust would do as well. The second is protection from competitive results, such as entry control and setting of minimum prices. The third is regulation of externalities such as pollution and accidents arising as byproducts of more usual production.

Mobility Factors In Antitrust Cases: Assessing Market Power In Light Of Conditions Affecting Entry And Fringe Expansion, William H. Wentz

Michigan Law Review

To assist courts and litigants in developing and utilizing information on mobility factors in a meaningful manner, I have attempted in this Article to outline a basic approach for analyzing the competitive and efficiency significance of mobility factors in a litigative context. In Part I, I lay the necessary foundation: discussing the importance of mobility factors in accepted economic theory, explaining the sources of the current confusion and controversy about "entry barriers" and deriving from the debate areas of fundamental agreement among economists. Building on this common ground, I develop in Part II a basic approach to consideration of mobility …

Economic Liberties And The Constitution, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Economic Liberties and the Constitution by Bernard H. Siegan