5 different things people mean when they say we need to revive antitrust

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Antitrust regulation and economic concentration are suddenly everywhere in progressive thinking about economic policy. At least five different ideas are floating around that often get mushed together under the same broad heading. These are both conceptually distinct notions with different economic implications and, critically, different paths to implementation:

  1. We should be stricter with existing doctrine
  2. We should be more skeptical of vertical mergers
  3. We should emphasize harms beyond consumers
  4. We should re-emphasize broader worries about concentration
  5. We should take a harder line on “predatory pricing”

The upshot of all of this is that lurking behind a broad Democratic Party consensus that the government needs to beef up its antitrust efforts, there’s plenty of room for disagreement and it’s not clear that all the relevant parties have really considered the full implications of some of the things they have said.


5 different things people mean when they say we need to revive antitrust