Chillin'Competition

Relaxing whilst doing Competition Law is not an Oxymoron

Archive for February 20th, 2013

Competition Policy and Happiness

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Many of you have probably had a chance to read various texts on the goals of competition law (the one in Giorgio Monti’s book is particularly good; more recently, I also liked Kevin Coates’ approach).

For an original approach to this discussion, check out Maurice Stucke’s recent paper “Should Competition Policy Promote Happiness?”  As noted in the abstract, the paper builds on recent academic literature on happiness and goes on to argue that “competition policy in a post-industrial wealthy country would get more bang (in terms of increased  well-being) in promoting economic, social and democratic values, rather than simply promoting a narrowly-defined consumer welfare objective“,

Many thanks to Wouter Wils for the pointer!

 

P.S. And speaking of papers, Pablo Ibañez, Hans Zenger and myself could use some additional votes for Concurrence’s Antitrust Writing Awards   😉

Written by Alfonso Lamadrid

20 February 2013 at 1:41 pm