Situating The Dynamic Competition Approach

Abstract

The dynamic competition approach defines an improvement path for antitrust law. Interested in competitive realities more than political activities, the growing body of scholarship studying dynamic competition (i.e., competition through technology) wants to make antitrust diagnosis and analysis more accurate without sacrificing administrability. At a high level, the dynamic competition approach appears to some as a twenty-first-century equivalent of the Chicago school of antitrust. This article shows that the analogy is only partially correct. Unlike the Chicago school of antitrust law, the dynamic competition approach is innovation oriented, empirical, enforcement friendly, and interdisciplinary. To illustrate this distinction more concretely, the article reviews past cases through the lens of the dynamic competition approach. It concludes that the dynamic competition approach is the natural evolution for all systems of antitrust law that reassess doctrine in light of the progression of economic and technical understanding of competition.

Keywords: dynamic competition, chicago school, antitrust, competition law, innovation

JEL Classification: K21, K20, K00, L12, L10, L13, L22, L40, L41, L44, L43, L50, L51, B40, D11, D42