Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-pfhbr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T00:48:46.160Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Tougher price competition or lower concentration: a trade-off for anti-trust authorities?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

George Norman
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Massachusetts
Jacques-François Thisse
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Get access

Summary

Introduction

Looking at the history of anti-trust laws, their first and possibly main objective seems to have been the forbidding of price collusion – that is, to prevent different sellers to agree in fixing the price of their product. For instance, the Sherman Act (1890) was, in its early period, generally interpreted as a law against cartels and moreover ‘in the enforcement of the Sherman Act against cartels, emphasis has been placed upon establishing the fact of an agreement pertaining to price’ (Posner, 1977, p. 213). The application of the Act to mergers came only later and was subject to controversy. Judges did not immediately use the argument that, by consolidation into a single-firm, cartel members could evade the law. As a result, following the Sherman Act, there was a sharp increase in the number of mergers in United States industry at the end of the nineteenth century as documented, among others, by Bittlingmayer (1985). More recently a similar evolution was observed in the European Community legislation. For years it had been discussed whether articles 85 and 86 of the Rome Treaty (1957), could have been directly applied to mergers and acquisitions. It was only in 1989 that a new regulation on such cases was adopted ‘in the 1992 perspective and given the corresponding wave of mergers and takeovers’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Market Structure and Competition Policy
Game-Theoretic Approaches
, pp. 125 - 142
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×