Consumer welfare standard

As a goal of antitrust, the consumer welfare standard has borne unfair attacks, which we refuted in a previous article. In this second article, we explain how the consumer welfare standard, understood as a method rather than as a set of goals, enables antitrust authorities and courts to navigate the inherent ambiguities of the competitive process and facilitate procompetitive outcomes.

Nicolas Petit and Lazar Radic refute common critiques of the consumer welfare standard. A second article will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different antitrust standards, underscoring some points often ignored by the critics of the consumer welfare standard.

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their inception in...

Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard  is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.

“Consumer Welfare” has lost its place as the animating value and standard for modern antitrust. The standard is almost universally regarded as bunk and...

The consumer welfare standard can’t be saved with more theory. The problem is how it works in practice, and solving that means changing the...

The consumer welfare standard employs a collective consumer in its model when evaluating possibly anticompetitive behavior. This aggregated approach fails to recognize that such...

Debates about the consumer welfare standard have failed to produce a consensus around either its scope or an alternative standard. Regardless of the outcome...

“Consumer welfare” as an objective of antitrust law and regulation has its origins in several vague and even conflicting ideas of how to evaluate...