The Theory and Practice of Antitrust: A Perspective in the History of Economic Ideas

This paper is organised as follows. Section 1 presents the institutional setting of antitrust. Section 2 argues that the intellectual roots of the received institutional design of antitrust rest on the combination of the normatively bent approach of utilitarian liberalism and the ‘structural’ analysis of the competitive process provided by the neo-classical school. Section 3 presents some alternative views of market decentralisation in the history of economic thought. Section 4 discusses the main characteristics of the current institutional design of antitrust grounded on economic structuralism. Section 5 is concerned with the Chicago critique of antitrust structuralism. Section 6 discusses post-Chicago developments and the challenges they pose today for the design of an antitrust institution.