At a time when tech giants have amassed vast market power, Jonathan Baker shows how laws and regulations can be updated to ensure more competition. The sooner courts and antitrust enforcement agencies stop listening to the Chicago school and start paying attention to modern economics, the sooner Americans will reap the benefits of competition.

A new and urgently needed guide to making the American economy more competitive at a time when tech giants have amassed vast market power. The U.S. economy is growing less competitive. Large businesses increasingly profit by taking advantage of their customers and suppliers. These firms can also use sophisticated pricing algorithms and customer data to secure substantial and persistent advantages over smaller players. In our new Gilded Age, the likes of Google and Amazon fill the roles of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Jonathan Baker shows how business practices harming competition manage to go unchecked. The law has fallen behind technology, but that is not the only problem. Inspired by Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and the “Chicago school,” the Supreme Court has, since the Reagan years, steadily eroded the protections of antitrust. The Antitrust Paradigm demonstrates that Chicago-style reforms intended to unleash competitive enterprise have instead inflated market power, harming the welfare of workers and consumers, squelching innovation, and reducing overall economic growth. Baker identifies the errors in economic arguments for staying the course and advocates for a middle path between laissez-faire and forced deconcentration: the revival of pro-competitive economic regulation, of which antitrust has long been the backbone. Drawing on the latest in empirical and theoretical economics to defend the benefits of antitrust, Baker shows how enforcement and jurisprudence can be updated for the high-tech economy. His prescription is straightforward. The sooner courts and the antitrust enforcement agencies stop listening to the Chicago school and start paying attention to modern economics, the sooner Americans will reap the benefits of competition.

In the 1970s, when the United States economy was struggling and the term "stagflation" was coined to capture inflation plus stagnant business growth, the "Chicago school" critique of antitrust rules gained ascendance. In the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan's two terms as president, that critique's policy prescriptions-the eliminating of or modifying anticompetitive rules to make them less restrictive-became common practice. As Jonathan Baker writes, "The Chicago approach to antitrust can be understood as a gamble. More relaxed antitrust rules would allow firms to achieve greater efficiencies, which would more than compensate for any risk of firms exercising market power. Put differently, the Chicagoans bet that antitrust reform could achieve long term consumer welfare gains without facilitating the creation of substantial and durable market power." The Antitrust Paradigm presents a wealth of evidence arguing that the Chicagoans lost their bet, and prescribes what should be done about it. Since the 1980s, not only has market power widened, economic productivity decline, and consumer welfare gains been modest at best, but also the economy has changed, most visibly in the information technology and Internet giants that top the financial market's valuation charts. Baker argues that both the failures of antitrust reform and the changed economy demand a new antitrust paradigm, one that restores a competitive economy through strengthened antitrust, recognizes antitrust's political context, and identifies the competitive harms from dominant information technology platforms. His book frames the problem, examines the distinctive competitive problems of the information economy, and concludes with a guide for restoring effective antitrust policies.--

A concise but thorough resource, the guide provides a time-saving reference for the latest case law, and the most recent legislation affecting rulemaking.

Competition and consumer protection -- The economics of information -- Information and market power -- Agreements on information -- Exclusion by information -- "Confusopoly" and information asymmetries -- Privacy as an information product -- Information and intellectual property -- Restraint of trade and freedom of speech

After thirty years, the debate over antitrust's ideology has quieted. Most now agree that the protection of consumer welfare should be the only goal of antitrust laws. Execution, however, is another matter. The rules of antitrust remain unfocused, insufficiently precise, and excessively complex. The problem of poorly designed rules is severe, because in the short run rules weigh much more heavily than principles. At bottom, antitrust is a defensible enterprise only if it can make the microeconomy work better, after accounting for the considerable costs of operating the system. The Antitrust Enterprise is the first authoritative and compact exposition of antitrust law since Robert Bork's classic The Antitrust Paradox was published more than thirty years ago. It confronts not only the problems of poorly designed, overly complex, and inconsistent antitrust rules but also the current disarray of antitrust's rule of reason, offering a coherent and workable set of solutions. The result is an antitrust policy that is faithful to the consumer welfare principle but that is also more readily manageable by the federal courts and other antitrust tribunals.

In 2012, when the Justice Department sued Apple and five book publishers for price fixing, many observers sided with the defendants. It was a reminder that, in practice, Americans are ambivalent about competition. Chris Sagers shows why protecting price competition, even when it hurts some of us, is crucial if antitrust law is to preserve markets.