Antitrust and technological innovation in the US: ideas, institutions, decisions, and impacts, 1890–2000

Abstract The history of antitrust policy in the US as it relates to technological innovation exhibits major swings every few decades between favoring concentration and favoring deconcentration. This paper sketches for each period the contending ideas that frame antitrust-technology policy debates, the salience of these ideas in the larger antitrust policy process, the institutions for agenda-setting and decision-making in this area, the policy decisions themselves, and (more speculatively) the impacts of these decisions on technological innovation and industrial development. The paper concludes with a preliminary attempt to identify the cyclical, secular, and static processes that have shaped the history of this policy area and to use this analysis to inform future policy-makers.

[1]  M. Lessnoff.  Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , 1979 .

[2]  Robert J. Barro,et al.  Sources of economic growth , 1994 .

[3]  David C. Mowery,et al.  SEMATECH and collaborative research: Lessons in the design of high‐technology consortia , 1994 .

[4]  Richard Schmalensee,et al.  Handbook of Industrial Organization , 1989 .

[5]  W. Rupert Maclaurin,et al.  Economic Factors Influencing the Development and Introduction of the Fluorescent Lamp , 1943, Journal of Political Economy.

[6]  W. Taft.  The Anti-Trust ACT and the Supreme Court , 1914 .

[7]  John E. Lopatka,et al.  Microsoft, Monopolization, and Network Externalities: Some Uses and Abuses of Economic Theory in Antitrust Decision Making , 1995 .

[8]  S. F. Ross.  Principles of antitrust law , 1993 .

[9]  Daniel L. Rubinfeld.  Antitrust Enforcement in Dynamic Network Industries , 1998 .

[10]  Herbert Hovenkamp,et al.  Competition Policy in America, 1888-1992 , 1997 .

[11]  Innovations in Antitrust Enforcement , 1996 .

[12]  Robert D. Anderson,et al.  Competition policy and intellectual property rights in the knowledge-based economy , 1998 .

[13]  M. Cave.  Changing the rules: technological change, international competition and regulation in communications , 1990 .

[14]  Hans B. Thorelli,et al.  The Federal Antitrust Policy: Origination of an American Tradition , 1957 .

[15]  Walter Dean Burnham,et al.  Critical Elections: And the Mainsprings of American Politics , 1970 .

[16]  Kenneth Flamm,et al.  Changing the Rules: Technological Change, International Competition, and Regulation in Communications , 1989 .

[17]  T. Dublin,et al.  Research policy , 2021, The Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics.

[18]  F. Scherer,et al.  Rewriting History: the Early Sherman Act Monopolization Cases , 1995 .

[19]  Edward Sagendorph Mason,et al.  The Current Status of the Monopoly Problem in the United States , 1949 .

[20]  David J. Teece,et al.  Innovation, Cooperation and Antitrust , 1989 .

[21]  Harold Stein,et al.  Public Administration and Policy Development , 1952 .

[22]  Louis D. Brandeis.  Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It , 1986 .

[23]  Hans Birger Thorelli,et al.  The Federal Antitrust Policy, Origination of an American Tradition@@@Selected Antitrust Cases, Landmark Decisions in Federal Antitrust@@@Das Dilemma eines deutschen Antitrustgesetzes@@@Public utilities und gemischtwirtschaftliche Unternehmungen in nationaler und internationaler Sicht , 1956 .

[24]  Wesley M. Cohen,et al.  Empirical studies of innovation and market structure , 1989 .

[25]  H. C. Adams.  RELATION OF THE STATE TO INDUSTRIAL ACTION. , 2012, Science.

[26]  Josh Lerner,et al.  Stronger Protection or Technological Revolution: What is Behind the Recent Surge in Patenting? , 1997 .

[27]  C. Ashley.  Concentration of Economic Power , 1957 .

[28]  D. Schloss.  Publications of the American Economic Association. , 1895 .

[29]  Woodrow Wilson.  The New Freedom , 1913 .

[30]  M. Kirkpatrick,et al.  Industrial Concentration: The New Learning , 1974 .

[31]  W. Baumol,et al.  Use of Antitrust to Subvert Competition , 1985, The Journal of Law and Economics.

[32]  G. Bittlingmayer.  Antitrust and Business Activity: The First Quarter Century , 1996, Business History Review.

[33]  Andrew Grove,et al.  Only the Paranoid Survive , 1996 .

[34]  R. Tollison.  Public Choice and Antitrust , 1985 .

[35]  Erwin A. Blackstone,et al.  Winners, Losers, and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, 1999, pp. 288 , 2002 .

[36]  R. J. Gilgert,et al.  Incorporating Dynamic Efficiency Concerns in Merger Analysis: The Use of Innovation Markets , 1994 .

[37]  Joseph F. Brodley.  Antitrust Law and Innovation Cooperation , 1990 .

[38]  Roger G. Noll,et al.  Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953. By Hart David M.. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 267p. $39.95 , 2000, American Political Science Review.

[39]  David A. Hounshell,et al.  Science and corporate strategy , 1988 .

[40]  P. Hall.  The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations , 1989 .

[41]  Rachel Griffith,et al.  Innovation and Market Structure , 1993 .

[42]  David A. Hounshell,et al.  Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D , 1989 .

[43]  H. P. Fairchild,et al.  The Folklore of Capitalism. , 1938 .

[44]  W. Baumol.  Contestable Markets: An Uprising in the Theory of Industry Structure , 1982 .

[45]  David A. Hounshell,et al.  Science and corporate strategy : Du Pont R&D, 1902-1980 , 1990 .

[46]  D. Mowery.  The U.S. national innovation system: Origins and prospects for change , 1992 .

[47]  Steven Klepper,et al.  A Reprise of Size and R & D , 1996 .

[48]  Stephen E. Margolis,et al.  Winners, Losers & Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology , 1999 .

[49]  James E. Anderson,et al.  The Politics of U.S. Antitrust Regulation , 1993 .

[50]  M. Peck.  Competition in the aluminum industry, 1945-1958 , 1961 .

[51]  W. H. Page.  Microsoft and the Public Choice Critique of Antitrust , 1999 .

[52]  Kenneth Warren,et al.  R & D for Industry: A Century of Technical Innovation at Alcoa. , 1993 .

[53]  Samuel Kortum,et al.  What is behind the recent surge in patenting , 1999 .

[54]  W. Arthur.  Positive feedbacks in the economy , 1990 .

[55]  The National Cooperative Research Act of 1984: A New Antitrust Regime for Joint Research and Development Ventures , 1986 .

[56]  C. Didier,et al.  Winners, Losers and Microsoft. Competition and Antitrust in High Technology - Stan J. Liebowitz & Stephen E. Margolis , 2000 .

[57]  Abdelhak Senhadji,et al.  Sources of Economic Growth: An Extensive Growth Accounting Exercise , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[58]  United States v. United Shoe Machinery Corporation: An Economic Analysis of an Anti-Trust Case , 1956 .

[59]  Frederic M. Scherer,et al.  Schumpeter and Plausible Capitalism , 1992 .

[60]  Hal R. Varian,et al.  Information rules - a strategic guide to the network economy , 1999 .

[61]  M. S. Morgan.  Competing notions of "competition" in late-nineteenth century American economics , 1993 .

[62]  C. Shapiro,et al.  Systems Competition and Network Effects , 1994 .

[63]  F. Scherer.  The economic effects of compulsory patent licensing , 1977 .

[64]  Philip M. Field,et al.  Industrial research and changing technology , 1940 .

[65]  Book Review: United States v. United Shoe Machinery Corporation, An Economic Analysis of an Antitrust Case , 1957 .

[66]  The Folklore of Capitalism , 1980 .

[67]  E. Mansfield.  Size of Firm, Market Structure, and Innovation , 1963, Journal of Political Economy.