Stucke, Maurice E. --- "What is Competition?" [2012] ELECD 402; in Zimmer, Daniel (ed), "The Goals of Competition Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: The Goals of Competition Law

Editor(s): Zimmer, Daniel

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857936608

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: What is Competition?

Author(s): Stucke, Maurice E.

Number of pages: 26

Extract:

2. What is competition?
Maurice E Stucke*

The financial crisis prompted in the United States unprecedented govern-
ment bailouts for banks, mortgage servicers, the insurance giant AIG,
and automotive makers General Motors and Chrysler. The crisis raised
important issues of market failure, weak regulation, our lack of under-
standing of systemic risk in financial markets, and moral hazard. The
crisis prompted policy-makers to re-examine fundamental issues such as
the efficiency of markets and the role of legal, social, and ethical norms in
a market economy.
The goals of antitrust and premises of its current neoclassical economic
theories are also being re-examined.1 After all, one well-recognized anti-
trust goal is `to avert the need for massive and ongoing government regu-
lation or nationalization.'2 The `overriding purpose of antitrust policy,'
wrote Professors Blake and Jones, `is to maintain an economy capable
of functioning effectively without creating an abundance of supervisory


* Associate Professor, University of Tennessee College of Law, and Senior
Fellow, American Antitrust Institute, USA. The author wishes to thank the par-
ticipants of the Fifth Annual ASCOLA Conference for their helpful comments,
and the University of Tennessee College of Law and the WW Davis Faculty
Development Fund for the summer research grant. This chapter is based on a
longer article `Reconsidering Competition', University of Tennessee Legal Studies
Research Paper No 123, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1646151.
1 JT Rosch, Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission, `Managing

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