A modern defense of public utility regulation has arisen from the "transactions costs" literature. Traditional economic theorists called for government to establish regulated, franchise monopolies to guard against over-investment and wasteful duplication in natural monopoly (i.e., cost...

Two recent court rulings have forced both law and economics to seriously reevaluate emerging marketplaces. In Sony "Corporation v. Universal Studios" (1983), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that videocassette recorders do "not" infringe upon the patent rights of a movie producer whose creation is...

South African apartheid is a social system arising from the economic conflict of competitive interest groups. During the past four centuries, this struggle has not been linear: Changing economic and demographic conditions have tended to make white and non-white subclasses net complementary...