Early Sunday Quote
Ronald Coase once said:
“One important result of this preoccupation with the monopoly problem is that if an economist finds something—a business practice of one sort or other—that he does not understand, he looks for a monopoly explanation. And as in this field we are very ignorant, the number of ununderstandable practices tends to be very large, and the reliance on a monopoly explanation, frequent.”
A quote worth ruminating, in light of the increased interest of antitrust agencies’ for unilateral conduct in dynamic industries.
Found on TOTM. The real source is Ronald H. Coase, “Industrial Organization: A Proposal for Research,” in Victor Fuchs, ed., Policy Issues and Research Issues in Industrial Organization (New York, NY: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1972), p. 69.
Today, and before reading this post, I read the exact same quote on an article written by Manne and Wright (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1577556 ) and seen another of Hopper’s Sunday pictures at a museum in Madrid !!
Alfonso Lamadrid
19 December 2010 at 9:26 pm
That one would also be fitting: “Ronald [Coase] said he had gotten tired of antitrust because when the prices went up the judges said it was monopoly, when the prices went down they said it was predatory pricing, and when they stayed the same they said it was tacit collusion.” William Landes, “The Fire of Truth: A Remembrance of Law and Econ at Chicago”, JLE (1981) p. 193.
P.S: If you read some german and are interested also in Swiss competiton law, I recommend this blog: www-kg-revision.com
Adrian Raass
20 December 2010 at 11:04 am
“Consumers said they had gotten tired of antitrust because when the prices went up the lawyers said it was to finance investment ex-ante, when the prices went down they said it was cut-throat pricing rivalry, and when they stayed the same they said it was unconscious price parallelism.” That is to say, when lawyers (re)discover this too-often-quoted Coase’s quote, reach for you wallet….
Paolo
21 December 2010 at 4:29 pm