Predatory Pricing in Antitrust Law and Economics: A Historical Perspective [Kõva köide]

"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.Nicola Giocoli is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pisa, Italy. "--

This is a historical analysis of the legal intellectual treatment of predatory pricing in the United States. Over the course of eight chapters, the author discusses of economic models of predatory pricing, 19th-century British common law of restraints on trade, American economists' views about antitrust and destructive competition at the turn of the 20th century, the formative era of American antitrust from the Sherman Act (1890) to the Clayton and FTC Acts (1914), enforcement between World War II and the late 1960s, the Chicago School's reaction to the 1950-60s crisis of predatory pricing law exemplified by the 1967 Utah Pie v. Continental Banking case, the development and judicial adoption of the Areeda and Turner's price/cost rule, and the triumph of the Chicago approach in the courts. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

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.