The Post-Chicago Antitrust Revolution: A Retrospective

Abstract

A symposium examining the contributions of the post-Chicago School provides an appropriate opportunity to offer some thoughts on both the past and the future of antitrust. This afterword reviews the excellent papers with an eye toward appreciating the contributions and limitations of both the Chicago School, in terms of promoting the consumer welfare standard and embracing price theory as the preferred mode of economic analysis, and the post-Chicago School, with its emphasis on game theory and firm-level strategic conduct. It then explores two emerging trends, specifically neo-Brandeisian advocacy for abandoning consumer welfare as the sole goal of antitrust and the increasing emphasis on empirical analyses.

Keywords: Antitrust law & policy, competition, political economy, economic theory, empiricism, intellectual history, consumer welfare, economic efficiency, price theory, Chicago & Harvard Schools

JEL Classification: B21, D40, K21, L40