Welfare Economics and Antitrust Policy: A Selective Summary

Abstract

This Article summarizes the most salient components of my study WELFARE ECONOMICS AND ANTITRUST POLICY. It (1) distinguishes moral-rights (justice) analysis from moral-good analysis, (2) defines and examines the relevant extensions of the liberal conception of justice, (3) defines various egalitarian conceptions of the moral good and argues that libertarianism is not morally defensible and would not in any event have many of the extensions some claim it has, (4) defines various categories of antitrust-policy-coverable conduct (including natural and contrived oligopolistic conduct of various sorts and predatory conduct of various sorts), (5) defines the components of the gap between a product’s price and marginal cost that need to be distinguished respectively in individualized-pricing and across-the-board-pricing situations, (6) defines “investment competition” and identifies the determinants of its intensity, (7) explains why markets cannot be defined non-arbitrarily, (8) defines “the impact of a choice on economic efficiency” and lists various categories of economic inefficiency that can be generated, (9) delineates the protocol for predicting the economic efficiency of a choice that is ex ante economically efficient (which considers the impact of choices on many categories of economic inefficiency that conventional analyses ignore, takes economically efficient account of the fact that the individual exemplars of Pareto imperfections that would cause economic inefficiency in an otherwise-Pareto-perfect economy can counteract as well as compound each other’s misallocative tendencies, and considers how to take appropriate account of the fact that both analysis and its financing are allocative-costly), (10) examines the policy-relevance of a choice’s impact on economic efficiency, and (11) executes some preliminary antitrust-policy analyses.