The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.

Provides a clear, concise and practical overview of the key economic techniques and evidence employed in European merger control.

These contributions discuss a number of important developments over the past decade in a newly established and important field of economics that have led to notable changes in views on governmental competition policies. They focus on the nature and role of competition and other determinants of market structures, such as numbers of firms and barriers to entry; other factors which determine the effective degree of competition in the market; the influence of major firms (especially when these pursue objectives other than profit maximization); and decentralization and coordination under control relationships other than markets and hierarchies.ContributorsJoseph E. Stiglitz, G. C. Archibald, B. C. Eaton, R. G. Lipsey, David Enaoua, Paul Geroski, Alexis Jacquemin, Richard J. Gilbert, Reinhard Selten, Oliver E. Williamson, Jerry R. Green, G. Frank Mathewson, R. A. Winter, C. d'Aspremont, J. Jaskold Gabszewicz, Steven Salop, Branko Horvat, Z. Roman, W. J. Baumol, J. C. Panzar, R. D. Willig, Richard Schmalensee, Richard Nelson, Michael Scence, and Partha Dasgupta

Law and Economics of Vertical Integration and Control focuses on the processes, methodologies, and approaches involved in the law and economics of vertical integration and control. The publication first elaborates on transaction costs, fixed proportions and contractual alternatives, and variable proportions and contractual alternatives. Discussions focus on sales revenue royalties, ownership integration, output royalties, important product-specific services, successive monopoly, advantages and limitations of internal transfers, and transaction cost determinants. The text then examines vertical integration under uncertainty and vertical integration without contractual alternatives. The book ponders on legal treatment of ownership integration and per se illegal contractual controls. Topics include tying arrangements, public policy assessment, resale price maintenance, vertical integration and the Sherman Act, market foreclosure doctrine, and the 1982 Merger Guidelines. The text also takes a look at contractual controls that are not illegal per se, alternative legal rules, and antitrust policy. The publication is a dependable reference for researchers interested in the law and economics of vertical integration and control.

In this text some fundamental issues concerning the strategic impact of vertical structures of firms are discussed in a successive oligopoly model. Vertical integration strategy has been identified as one of the key strategies which determine the success or failure of enterprises. Many studies on vertical integration are based on business experiences and interviews with managers. However, the extensive application of game theory in business economics allows this study on vertical integration to be based on sound theoretic ground. Moreover, the significance of public enterprises in some Western European economies and the trends of economic transition in Eastern Europe justify the efforts to analyse vertical integration issues in the mixed market, which is created by the participation of a public firm into an industry otherwise characterised as a successive oligopoly.