What Is Workable Competition, Anyway (and Why Should We Care)

The necessity for some form of a model of workable competition is the impossibility of a perfectly competitive market. Yet, in economic regulation and antitrust, judgments must be made whether a market is sufficiently competitive to justify regulatory restraint. This paper briefly reviews the history of the concept, and presents an argument that determination of workable competition is analytically intractable. Therefore, a real world economist needs to rely on descriptive analysis of markets in conjunction with economic models and econometrics in determining whether an actual market is "workably competitive."