Reconciling Efficiency and Equity

Provides a new conceptualization of competition law as economic inequality and its interaction with efficiency become of central concern to policy and decision-makers.

This book explores the role of competition law as a form of economic and social regulation in modern technological capitalism. It should attract competition academics, competition policy officials, judges and policy-makers, competition law students, and trade regulation experts.Due to the growing influence of economics and economists in competition law and policy discourse and the internationalization of antitrust, the equity versus efficiency trade-off debate has played a defining role in the transformation of the dominant paradigm governing competition law enforcement since at least the 1970s. The debate remains crucial today as issues of economic inequality and its interaction with efficiency become of central concern to policy and decision-makers in competition law, as well as in other spheres of public policy. Despite their central role in the grammar of competition law on the global plane, the intellectual underpinnings of the interactions between 'equity' and 'efficiency' in the context of competition law have never been examined in-depth. This book aims precisely to fill this gap by discussing new approaches in understanding the role of efficiency and equity concerns in competition law.