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Does Antitrust Policy Improve Consumer Welfare? Assessing the Evidence
Abstract
This paper reviews the literature and assesses the effects of antitrust policy and enforcement on consumer welfare. We find no evidence that antitrust policy in the areas of monopolization, collusion, and mergers has provided much benefit to consumers and, in some instances, we find evidence that it may have lowered consumer welfare. We also do not find any evidence that antitrust policy has deterred firms from engaging in actions that could harm consumers. We identify various reasons for the apparent ineffectiveness of antitrust policy, offer preliminary policy recommendations, and suggest ways in which economists could more fully assess antitrust policy.
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Citations
Cited by
Angrist, J. D., & Pischke, J.-S. (2010) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.24.2.3 · Cited by 1,566
Angrist, J. D., & Pischke, J.-S. (2010) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.1639809 · Cited by 381
Competition Policy and Productivity Growth: An Empirical Assessment
Buccirossi, P., Ciari, L., Duso, T., Spagnolo, G., & Vitale, C. (2013) · The Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.1162/rest_a_00304 · Cited by 316
The Price Effects of a Large Merger of Manufacturers: A Case Study of Maytag-Whirlpool
Ashenfelter, O. C., Hosken, D. S., & Weinberg, M. C. (2013) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy · doi:10.1257/pol.5.1.239 · Cited by 111
Metadata
- Authors
- Crandall, R. W., & Winston, C.
- Venue
- Journal of Economic Perspectives
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2003-11-01
- Volume
- 17
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 3-26
- ISSN
- 0895-3309 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2027882044
- Cited by
- 256
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 25.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
