According to conventional wisdom, monopoly increases price and reduces output; it transfers money from consumers to producers, but consumers lose more than what producers gain; the difference is a welfare loss to society, known as deadweight loss. However, this is a partial-equilibrium story,...

This is one of a bundle of essays on the economics of antitrust. It is about the way the concept of efficiency is dealt with in competition analysis and the welfare standard of antitrust. I pay particular attention to Pareto efficiency, what it stands for and what it does not stand for, and its...

In this article a description is given of what exactly market participants are free to do in a free market, under what conditions market freedom leads to economic efficiency, why a free-market system cannot be expected to lead to socially acceptable outcomes and how competition policy is...

There are two standard versions for one-shot oligopoly games: the Cournot game and the Bertrand game. The common feature is that in both games the strategic variables are supply curves. Under Cournot the supply curves are vertical lines in price-quantity space, under Bertrand they are horizontal...

This article is about the interpretation of Nash equilibria of one-shot oligopoly games in competition analysis. Such equilibria are often understood as steady-state equilibria of the corresponding game with continuous interaction between the market players. In my view, such interpretations are...

Collusion, particularly collusion is in the form of hardcore cartel behavior, is the worst antitrust offense of all. People engaging in such conduct should be punished severely. That is the consensus among antitrust officials. I argue against, that collusion is not that bad as antitrust...

The reforms of telecommunication regulation in Mexico, adopted recently, are inspired by a mistaken diagnosis of the state of affairs in the industry. Moreover, they introduce and reinforce a type of regulation that has proved little successful elsewhere, particularly in Europe. By doing so,...

Competition is generally believed to greatly contribute to social welfare and economic progress, and that is the raison d'être of competition policy. In this essay I argue that such expectations are vastly overblown, that competition brings about the envisaged benefits only under specific...

Duopolists anticipating each other's reactions in a game of repeated interaction do not settle at the Cournot or Bertrand equilibrium of the corresponding one-shot game. In this essay I show that there is a process of trial and error driving duopolists to a steady-state equilibrium where they...

This is one out of a bundle of essays on the economics of antitrust. It argues that the traditional rule-of-reason approach to the assessment of business conduct erodes the predictability of law enforcement and, as a consequence, the legal certainty of the business community. As the pro- and...