Antitrust Policy Analysis

• Semester: Spring 2024
• Course ID: 496V
• Credit Hours: 4
• Unique: 28645

Description

This course addresses antitrust policy as opposed to antitrust law (though many of the policy-analyses incorporate analyses of the motivations for and consequences of antirust-policy-coverable conduct that are also relevant to the legality of the conduct under U.S. antitrust law). The course has 6 components: (1) analyses of the liberal conception of justice that I argue the U.S. is constitutionally committed to instantiating and its general antitrust-policy-related corollaries; (2) analyses of the various morally-defensible egalitarian conceptions of the moral good that it is morally appropriate for the U.S. government to try to instantiate in ways that are not liberal-moral-rights-violative; (3) analyses of the definition of “the impact of a choice on economic efficiency,” the protocol for economic-efficiency prediction that is ex ante economically efficient to use, and the moral relevance of a choice’s impact on economic efficiency; (4) analyses of whether all exemplars of a particular category of antitrust-policy-coverable conduct are liberal-moral-rights-violative and the conditions under which particular exemplars of some categories of antitrust-policy-coverable conduct are liberal-moral-rights-violative; (5) analyses of the conditions under which particular exemplars of antitrust-policy-coverable conduct will serve or disserve the instantiation of the utilitarian, equal-utility, and equal-resource egalitarian conceptions of the moral good (including analyses of the impact of such conduct on economic efficiency and on the equality of the distribution of income and wealth); and (6) analyses of the allocative cost and difficulty of executing the preceding analyses and the implications of these realities for the identification of morally-desirable antitrust policies. The conduct that will be examined includes oligopolstic conduct, predatory conduct, non-vertical mergers and acquisitions, non-vertical joint ventures, non-vertical internal growth, and vertical integration and its pricing-technique, contract-clause, and sales-policy surrogates. The economic-efficiency analyses will consider a wide variety of categories of economic inefficiency that conventional analyses ignore and the reality that and the individual imperfections that would cause economic inefficiency in an economy that contains no other such imperfection can counteract as well as compound each other.

No Background in moral philosophy or economics will be presumed, but students without such backgrounds will have to work harder at the beginning. There will be a 100-minute closed-book, essay mid-term exam and a 240-minute closed book, essay final exam. The mid-term grade will count one-third if it is higher than the final-exam grade and not at all if it is lower than the final-exam grade. The grade of students whose class-participation improves the course will be increased modestly on that account.