Transatlantic Divide: A Poll Among (Progressive) EU and (Conservative) US IO Economists
Damien Geradin reports about a 2001 poll taken among US and European IO economists.
Compared to European IO economists, the Americans are:These findings are aligned with observations on this blog about the implicit conservatism of epistemological humility in economics and the legal process.
- less likely to want to restrict research joint ventures (question 6)
- more optimistic about the positive effects of mergers on profitability (19)
- less likely to interpret the higher price-cost margins of large firms as a consequence of market power (20)
- somewhat less likely to expect collusion in markets with only a few firms (21)
- more likely to believe that market power is a short-run phenomenon (22)
- more likely to believe that the importance of predation has been widely exaggerated (23)
- more likely to believe that consumer protection laws generally reduce economic efficiency (24)
- more likely to favor reducing the influence of regulatory authorities (7)
- less likely to believe that the deregulation of telecoms has lead to new monopolies (25)
- more willing to count producers’ surplus in addition to consumer’s surplus in regulatory policy (8)
- less willing to use competition policy to attack tacit collusion (9)
- less likely to condemn the exchange of information among competitors (10)
- more likely to believe that international competition has made the regulation of monopolies an outdated policy (26)
- more likely to believe that effective concentration has been reduced in the last two decades by globalization (27)
- and less likely to think of the goal of antitrust policy as inducing firms to equate price and marginal or average cost (11)
Technorati Tags: antitrust, competition law, survey
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