Transaction Costs and Competition Policy

28 Pages Posted: 29 Jan 2019

See all articles by Dennis W. Carlton

Dennis W. Carlton

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

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Date Written: January 17, 2019

Abstract

This paper studies how current competition policy should be altered in order to take into account our understanding of how transaction costs influence the ability of firms and consumers to deal with market power. Ever since Coase (1937) first established the importance of transaction costs to understand the theory of the firm, the study of transaction costs has been central to understanding several aspects of firm organization. Coase’s article (1960) on social costs underscored the importance of transaction costs in understanding why certain externalities exist. There has been a large literature exploring externalities and their relation to transaction costs in the field of public finance. There has been no corresponding literature in the field of competition policy despite the fact that a distortion of competition is an externality. The externality that competition authorities typically study is the one caused by the gap between price and marginal cost that arises from the existence of market power. Surprisingly, antitrust scholars have not spent as much time as warranted to think through how transaction costs should affect an assessment of market power and competition policy. This paper aims to fill that gap. The paper shows how current thinking about horizontal mergers, vertical mergers and vertical restrictions, Nash-in Nash bargaining models, two-sided markets, and control of data all need to be modified if one wants to avoid incorrect competition policy prescriptions.

Keywords: Antitrust, Mergers, Vertical Restraints, Transactions Costs

JEL Classification: L00, L14, L22, L40, L41, L42, L49

Suggested Citation

Carlton, Dennis W., Transaction Costs and Competition Policy (January 17, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3317703 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3317703

Dennis W. Carlton (Contact Author)

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