Sezione Diritto e società
Predatory Pricing in Antitrust Law and Economics: A Historical Perspective
Nicola Giocoli - Routledge, 2014
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| Anteprima |
Can
a price ever be too low? Can competition ever be ruinous? Questions
like these have always accompanied American antitrust law. They testify
to the difficulty of antitrust enforcement, of protecting competition
without protecting competitors. As the business practice that
most directly raises these kinds of questions, predatory pricing is at
the core of antitrust debates. The history of its law and economics
offers a privileged standpoint for assessing the broader development of
antitrust, its past, present and future. In contrast to existing
literature, this book adopts the perspective of the history of economic
thought to tell this history, covering a period from the late 1880s to
present times.
The image of a big firm, such as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil or Duke’s American Tobacco, crushing its small rivals by underselling them is iconic in American antitrust culture. It is no surprise that the most brilliant legal and economic minds of the last 130 years have been engaged in solving the predatory pricing puzzle. The book shows economic theories that build rigorous stories explaining when predatory pricing may be rational, what welfare harm it may cause and how the law may fight it. Among these narratives, a special place belongs to the Chicago story, according to which predatory pricing is never profitable and every low price is always a good price.
The image of a big firm, such as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil or Duke’s American Tobacco, crushing its small rivals by underselling them is iconic in American antitrust culture. It is no surprise that the most brilliant legal and economic minds of the last 130 years have been engaged in solving the predatory pricing puzzle. The book shows economic theories that build rigorous stories explaining when predatory pricing may be rational, what welfare harm it may cause and how the law may fight it. Among these narratives, a special place belongs to the Chicago story, according to which predatory pricing is never profitable and every low price is always a good price.
