This text provides a comprehensive and succinct treatment of the history, structure, and behaviour of the various US institutions that enforce antitrust laws. It also draws comparisons with the structure of institutional enforcement outside the US, and it considers the possibility of creating international antitrust institutions.

Dan Crane's The Institutional Structure of Antitrust Enforcement (2011), the subject of this review, threatened completely to change my understanding of antitrust law and policy. Crane's 12-chapter discussion of antitrust enforcement, with primary emphasis on the US, but turning in the last three chapters to a comparative and international perspective, would serve well for a seminar class: the class could cover one chapter per week for the semester, leaving the remaining week or two for student paper presentations. This book is endlessly fascinating, educational, and for those in the academic and policy realms, even useful. Crane is leading the charge toward a new theory of antitrust that may permit or require the revisiting of substantive legal rules in light of new understandings of their application in the real world of enforcement.

This text provides a comprehensive and succinct treatment of the history, structure, and behaviour of the various US institutions that enforce antitrust laws. It also draws comparisons with the structure of institutional enforcement outside the US, and it considers the possibility of creating international antitrust institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the institutions of antitrust enforcement in the United States and to test those institutions against a set of norms used to assess the operations of administrative agencies. The paper is part of a broader project studying global administrative agencies. The paper begins with a short review of the statutory structure of the U.S. antitrust system (federal, state, and private) and a more in-depth description of the institutional structure of antitrust enforcement in the United States, including the interaction between U.S. and non-U.S. enforcement agencies. The second part of the paper examines the performance of the two federal enforcement agencies (the Justice Department Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission) in two general areas, case-by-case decision-making and institutional performance. Within the case-by-case category, the paper reviews three aspects of the process -- the decision to proceed, adjudication, and appeals -- and two broad due process norms relevant to individual case decision-making -- non-discrimination and proportionality of remedies. Within the institutional performance category, the paper reviews five broad norms -- operational efficiency, expertise, transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. With regard to each of these ten areas, the paper describes and assesses the two antitrust agencies separately. The paper concludes that the U.S. antitrust enforcement system measures up well in terms of the due process and institutional performance norms that are the focus of the study. Although major structural changes in the system appear to be both unnecessary and unlikely, the paper suggests some incremental changes to increase transparency and accountability throughout the decision-making process.

Some of the chief aims of President Ronald Reagan's economic agenda were to reduce the "regulatory burden," minimize state intervention, and reinvigorate market mechanisms. Toward these ends, his administration limited antitrust enforcement to technical cases of price-fixing, invoking the doctrine of the Chicago school of economics. In Antitrust and the Triumph of Economics, Marc Eisner shows that the so-called "Reagan revolution" was but an extension of well-established trends. He examines organizational and procedural changes in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Jusice and the Federal Trade Commission that predated the 1980 election and forced the subsequent redefinition of policy. During their early years, the Antitrust Division and the FTC gave little attention to economic analysis. In the period following World War II, however, economic analysis assumed an increasingly important role in both agencies, and economists rose in status from being members of support staff to being pivotal decision makers who, in effect, shaped the policies for which elected officials were generally assumed to be responsible. In the 1960s and 1970s, critical shifts in prevailing economic theory within the academic community were transmitted into the agencies. This had a profound effect on how antitrust was conceptualized in the federal government. Thus, when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the antitrust agencies were already pursuing a conservative enforcement program. Eisner's study challenges dominant explanations of policy change through a focus on institutional evolution. It has important implications for current debates on the state, professionalization, and the delegation of authority. Originally published in 1991. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

This paper provides comments on the investigation by the US House Judiciary Committee (“the Committee”) into the state of competition in the digital marketplace. The comments focus on the third topic identified by the Committee:"Whether the institutional structure of antitrust enforcement - including the current levels of appropriations to the antitrust agencies, existing agency authorities, congressional oversight of enforcement, and current statutes and case law - is adequate to promote robust enforcement of the antitrust laws."The paper focuses principally on the policy implementation challenges that stand between ambitious reform aspirations and their effective realization in practice and the measures that Congress can take to strengthen antitrust's implementing institutions.Drawing on lessons from modern antitrust history, other jurisdictions, and our own experience, the paper proposes steps to overcome identified impediments that are otherwise likely to stand in the way of effective delivery of proposals to expand competition policy in the US.

Antitrust policy nominally plays an instrumental public interest role. The generally accepted notion is that it is a government instrument designed to intervene in relatively unregulated markets in order to preserve rivalry among independent buyers and sellers. Competition authorities are supposed to restrain business conduct that exercises monopoly power aimed at excluding competitors or exploiting consumers and clients. Thus it can be said - although few pro-market theorists make the insight explicit - that antitrust provisions reveal mistrust of the capacity of markets to promote social welfare. The inner logic, enforcement mechanisms, and practical outcomes of antitrust provisions are all intrinsically contradictory to the natural dynamic course of market functioning. In Dr. De Leon's challenging thesis, this mistrust of the market lies at the root of antitrust policy, giving rise always to a preference towards 'predicting' the result of impersonal market forces rather than interpreting the entrepreneurial behaviour which creates those forces. And it is in Latin America that he finds the powerful evidence he needs to support his case. From the formative years of Latin American economic institutions, during the Spanish Empire, economic regulations - far from being driven by the pursuit of promoting free trade and economic freedom - have been conceived, enacted and implemented in the context of deeply anti-market public policies, trade mercantilism and government dirigisme. The so-called "neoliberal" revolution of the 1990s triggered by the Washington Consensus did not really change the interventionist innuendo of these policies, but merely restated the social welfare goal to be achieved: the pursuit of economic efficiency. Dr. De Leon presents his case against the assumption that consumer welfare orientated policies such as antitrust do really promote entrepreneurship and market goals. Paradoxically, antitrust enforcement has undermined the transparency of market institutions, in the name of promoting market competition. The author's provocative analysis marshals several sets of facts in support of his thesis, including the actual functioning of antitrust policy as reflected in case law in various Latin American countries, the preference of merger control over other less intrusive forms of market surveillance, the constrained role of competition advocacy against government acts, and the ineffective institutional structure created to apply the policy. Among the many specific topics treated are the following: government immunity; strategic industries; state-owned enterprises; politically influential groups; measurement of market concentration; the burden of proof of social welfare benefits; the role of joint trade associations and professional guilds; institutional arrangements that favour collusion; selective distribution; sector regulation; erosion of property rights; marginal role of courts in the antitrust system; leniency programs; and privatized public utilities. The growing significance of Latin America in the context of economic globalization endows this book with huge international interest. Written by a leading authority on the topic, this is the first book that presents a detailed description of Latin American antitrust law and policy as it has been developed through numerous judicial opinions. A wide variety of audiences around the world will find it of extraordinary value: competition law specialists, scholars and students of the subject, policymakers and politicians in Latin America, as well as all interested lawyers, jurists, and economists.