Using the Consumer Choice Approach to Antitrust Law

The current paradigms of antitrust law - price and efficiency - do not work well enough. They were an immense improvement over their predecessors, and they have served the field competently for a generation, producing reasonably accurate results in most circumstances. Accumulated experience has also revealed their shortcomings, however. They are hard to fully understand and are not particularly transparent in their application. Moreover, in a disturbingly large number of circumstances they are unable to handle the important issue of non-price competition. In this article we suggest replacing the older paradigms with the somewhat broader approach of consumer choice. The choice framework has several advantages. It takes full account of all the things that are actually important to consumers- price, of course, but also variety, innovation, quality, and other forms of non-price competition. It is also far more transparent, which is an important administrative virtue even where, as in the great majority of cases, it will reach the same result. And in some important real-world situations it will lead to better substantive outcomes. There are a number of variety-valuing industries and circumstances that can be assessed correctly only by including an effective analysis of nonprice factors. We identify several of those in the article

Using the Consumer Choice Approach to Antitrust Law

The current paradigms of antitrust law - price and efficiency - do not work well enough. They were an immense improvement over their predecessors, and they have served the field competently for a generation, producing reasonably accurate results in most circumstances. Accumulated experience has also revealed their shortcomings, however. They are hard to fully understand and are not particularly transparent in their application. Moreover, in a disturbingly large number of circumstances they are unable to handle the important issue of non-price competition. In this article we suggest replacing the older paradigms with the somewhat broader approach of consumer choice. The choice framework has several advantages. It takes full account of all the things that are actually important to consumers- price, of course, but also variety, innovation, quality, and other forms of non-price competition. It is also far more transparent, which is an important administrative virtue even where, as in the great majority of cases, it will reach the same result. And in some important real-world situations it will lead to better substantive outcomes. There are a number of variety-valuing industries and circumstances that can be assessed correctly only by including an effective analysis of nonprice factors. We identify several of those in the article

Consumer Choice: The Practical Reason for Both Antitrust and Consumer Protection Law

This article is about the relationship between antitrust and consumer protection law. Its purpose is to define each area of law, to delineate the boundary between them, to show how they interact with each other, and to show how they ultimately support one another as the two components of a single overarching unity. That overarching unity is consumer choice. Antitrust and consumer protection law share a common purpose in that both are intended to facilitate the exercise of consumer sovereignty or effective consumer choice. Such consumer choice exists when two fundamental conditions are present: (l) there must be a range of consumer options made possible through competition; and (2) consumers must be able to select freely among these options

Consumer Sovereignty: A Unified Theory of Antitrust and Consumer Protection Law

This article is about the relationship between antitrust and consumer protection law. Its purpose is to define each area of law, to delineate the boundary between them, to show how they interact with each other, and to show how they ultimately support one another as the two component parts of an overarching unity: effective consumer choice (also called consumer sovereignty). Consumer choice only is effective when two fundamental conditions are present. There must be a range of consumer options made possible through competition, and consumers must be able to choose effectively among these options. The antitrust laws are intended to ensure that the marketplace remains competitive, unimpaired by practices such as price fixing or anticompetitive mergers. The consumer protection laws are then intended to ensure that consumers can choose effectively from among those options, with their critical faculties unimpaired by such violations as deception or the withholding of material information. Protection at both levels is needed to ensure that a market economy can continue to operate effectively. Legal protection of this sort is required only when the free market is not working properly. This article will demonstrate that antitrust violations stem from market failures in the general marketplace external to consumers, whereas consumer protection violations flow from market failures that take place, in a sense, inside the consumer\u27s heads. This approach provides a coherent theoretical platform from which antitrust and consumer protection law may be better understood and applied. It also has significant practical consequences, many of which are explored in this article. This article is a companion piece to Using the Consumer Choice to Antitrust Law, 74 Antitrust Law Journal 175 (2007)

Consumer Choice Is Where We Are All Going - so Let\u27s Go Together

Globalisation of business makes it important for firms to predict how their behaviour is likely to be treated in the roughly 200 nations that have competition laws. In that context, a crucial question is: are we in a position to develop a common intellectual framework that would give coherence to policy statements made on specific competition related issues and, at the same time, be acceptable, broadly, in a variety of legal systems, not necessarily based on identical assumptions? We believe that the answer is “yes.” A concept is emerging as a possible source of unification for competition policies around the globe: the concept of “consumer choice.

Consumer Choice Is Where We Are All Going - so Let\u27s Go Together

Globalisation of business makes it important for firms to predict how their behaviour is likely to be treated in the roughly 200 nations that have competition laws. In that context, a crucial question is: are we in a position to develop a common intellectual framework that would give coherence to policy statements made on specific competition related issues and, at the same time, be acceptable, broadly, in a variety of legal systems, not necessarily based on identical assumptions? We believe that the answer is “yes.” A concept is emerging as a possible source of unification for competition policies around the globe: the concept of “consumer choice.

Il dualismo nelle economie industriali

L'analisi dualistica come strumento per la comprensione e il controllo di un'economia industriale avanzata. Relazioni tra lo sviluppo economico e il dualismo; tecnologia, mercato del lavoro e squilibri territoriali. Il dualismo dell'economia italiana in un contesto internazionale.- Presentazione #7- Gli autori #9- Indice #11- 1. Il contributo dell'analisi dualistica per la comprensione e il controllo di una eco-nomia industriale, Roberto Artioli #13- 2. Dualismo nelle economie avanzate, Robert T. Averitt #27- 3. Lo sviluppo della macroimpresa e l'avvento dell'economia dualistica, Alfred D. Chandler #39- 4. Potere e protezionismo nel settore "moderno" dell'economia americana, Walter Adams #51- 5. Fondamenti tecnologici del dualismo, Michael J. Piore #63- 6. Alcune considerazioni sugli aspetti terri-toriali del dualismo economico, Berardo Cori #77- 7. L'analisi dualistica e le necessità della pianificazione francese, Henri Aujac #89- 8. Il dualismo come problema attuale della politica industriale in Spagna, Ramón Tamames #99- 9. Sviluppo economico e dualismo: Il caso italiano, Andrew Stevenson #119- 10. Sistema imprenditoriale e sistema poli-tico in Italia, Giuseppe Are #13

Time-resolved THz studies of carrier dynamics in semiconductors, superconductors, and strongly-correlated electron materials

Perhaps the most important aspect of contemporary condensed matter physics involves understanding strong Coulomb interactions between the large number of electrons in a solid. Electronic correlations lead to the emergence of new system properties, such as metal-insulator transitions, superconductivity, magneto-resistance, Bose-Einstein condensation, the formation of excitonic gases, or the integer and fractional Quantum Hall effects. The discovery of high-Tc superconductivity in particular was a watershed event, leading to dramatic experimental and theoretical advances in the field of correlated-electron systems. Such materials often exhibit competition between the charge, lattice, spin, and orbital degrees of freedom, whose cause-effect relationships are difficult to ascertain. Experimental insight into the properties of solids is traditionally obtained by time-averaged probes, which measure e.g., linear optical spectra, electrical conduction properties, or the occupied band structure in thermal equilibrium. Many novel physical properties arise from excitations out of the ground state into energetically higher states by thermal, optical, or electrical means. This leads to fundamental interactions between the system's constituents, such as electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions, which occur on ultrafast timescales. While these interactions underlie the physical properties of solids, they are often only indirectly inferred from time-averaged measurements. Time-resolved spectroscopy, consequently, is playing an ever increasing role to provide insight into light-matter interaction, microscopic processes, or cause-effect relationships that determine the physics of complex materials. In the past, experiments using visible and near-infrared femtosecond pulses have been extensively employed, e.g. to follow relaxation and dephasing processes in metals and semiconductors. However, many basic excitations in strongly-correlated electron systems and nanoscale materials occur at lower energies. The terahertz (THz) regime is particularly rich in such fundamental resonances. This includes ubiquitous lattice vibrations and low-energy collective oscillations of conduction charges. In nanoscale materials, band structure quantization also yields novel infrared and THz transitions, including intersubband absorption in quantum wells. The formation of excitons in turn leads to low-energy excitations analogous to inter-level transitions in atoms. In transition-metal oxides, fundamental excitation gaps arise from charge pairing into superconducting condensates and other correlated states. This motivates the use of ultrafast THz spectroscopy as a powerful tool to study light-matter interactions and microscopic processes in nanoscale and correlated-electron materials.A distinct advantage of coherent THz pulses is that the amplitude and phase of the electric field can be measured directly, as the THz fields are coherent with the fs pulses from which they are generated. Using THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS), both the real and imaginary parts of the response functions (such as the dielectric function) are obtained directly without the need for Kramers?Kronig transforms. The THz response can also be expressed in terms of absorption and refractive index, or as the optical conductivity. The optical conductivity describes the current response of a many-body system to an electric field, an ideal tool to study conducting systems. A second important advantage is the ultrafast time resolution that results from the short temporal duration of the THz time-domain sources. In particular, optical-pump THz-probe spectroscopy enables a delicate probe of the transient THz conductivity after optical photoexcitation. These experiments can provide insight into quasiparticle interactions, phase transitions, or nonequilibrium dynamics. In this chapter we will provide many such examples. Since THz spectroscopy of solids is a quickly expanding fiel