Antitrust Economics: Mergers, Contracting, and Strategic Behavior

This book brings together the work of Oliver Williamson, an important contributor to the literature of industrial organization and anti-trust economics. Williamson's contributions have included work on vertical integration and non-standard contracting practices, the modern corporation, strategic inter-firm behaviour and economies as an anti-trust defence. By helping to promote a new understanding of complex forms of economic organization, public policy in each of these areas has been influenced and sometimes reformed as a consequence. The work deals successively with mergers, complex contracting practices, strategic behaviour and the impact of ideas on anti-trust enforcement. Applied price theory and the new apparatus of transaction cost economics are both brought to bear. With a focus on the theory and practice of anti-trust in the US, the book is of wider application to any country tackling the problem of the control of big business and monopoly power.