Market Power and Public Policy

Catalog description

The purpose of antitrust laws is to control how firms attain and maintain their market position, presumably for the betterment of consumers, or at least for the benefit of society. Using a rigorous set of tools from microeconomic and game theory, this class will investigate the underpinnings of policies meant to deal with market power broadly defined, such as antitrust laws, the regulation of public utilities, the regulation of financial markets, and anti-dumping rules. The graduate section of this class will have additional assignments doing structural evaluation of mergers. This will involve a combination of estimation techniques and computational work for merger simulations. Prerequisite: Economics 608D.