Organization Control And The Single Entity Defense In Antitrust

Since at least the 1930s, economists have puzzled over how to delineate the boundaries of a firm. With the advent of antitrust legislation in 1890, American courts have been pressed to consider what constitutes conspiracies between corporate entities to restrain commerce. By the 1980s, courts started to characterize conspiracies by negation - that is, by extending the status of 'single entity' to certain types of agglomerations. Efforts both in economics and in the law to sort out what constitutes a 'firm' or 'single entity' have focused on 'control.' A difficulty is that neither the law nor economics offers an operationally significant concept of control. Even so, both the law and economics contribute concepts other than control that provide a way of understanding economic organization. These concepts - adaptation and control rights - suggest how one can subsume the sometimes confusing array of single entity tests proposed in the case law within a two-stage sequence of tests.

Since at least the 1930's economists have puzzled over how to delineate the boundaries of the firm. With the advent of antitrust legislation in 1890, courts have been pressed to consider what constitute conspiracies between corporate entities to restrain commerce. By the 1940's, courts started to characterize conspiracies by sorting out what they are not - specifically, by extending the status of "single entity" to certain types of business arrangements. Both efforts in economics and in the law to sort out what constitutes a "firm" or "single entity" have focused on "control." A difficulty is that neither the law nor economics offer an operationally significant concept of control. Even so, both law and economics contribute concepts other than control that provide a way of understanding economic organization. These concepts - control rights, adaptation, delegation, and renegotiation - suggests how one can subsume the sometimes confusing array of single entity tests proposed in the case law within a two-stage sequence of tests.

This book explores the interaction between competition law and corporate governance. It will appeal to an audience of lawyers and non-lawyer competition professionals in the US, UK, and EU, as well as other jurisdictions with competition law regimes.

Over the last fifty years in the United States, unions have been in deep decline, while income and wealth inequality have grown. In this timely work, editors Richard Bales and Charlotte Garden - with a roster of thirty-five leading labor scholars - analyze these trends and show how they are linked. Designed to appeal to those being introduced to the field as well as experts seeking new insights, this book demonstrates how federal labor law is failing today's workers and disempowering unions; how union jobs pay better than nonunion jobs and help to increase the wages of even nonunion workers; and how, when union jobs vanish, the wage premium also vanishes. At the same time, the book offers a range of solutions, from the radical, such as a complete overhaul of federal labor law, to the incremental, including reforms that could be undertaken by federal agencies on their own.

Develops a theory of collaborative capitalism that produces economic stability for businesses and workers in American urban cores.

Do institutions matter in economic theory? Or is the economic analysis of institutions a distraction from the most important action? Indeed, does Vernon Smith’s notion of the “institution-free core” of formal economic theory encompass that most important action? To explore this question, this book opens with an informal tour of the economics of system design out of which an economics of adaptation ultimately emerged. The book then offers explorations, via the application of the economics of adaptation in both law and economics relating to how parties manage relationships within the firm, within the context of long-term contracts, and, most vividly, within the context of antitrust conspiracy.