Book Review: The Economics of Industrial Organization

• Published date: 01 June 1991
• Date: 01 June 1991
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0003603X9103600207
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

The Antitrust Bulletin/Summer

1991

The Economics

of

Industrial

Organization

William G. Shepherd

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall (3d ed. 1990) ix +566 pp.

503

Reviewed by James W. Brock, Bill R. Moeckel Professor

of

Economics and Business, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

For jurists, practitioners and antitrust specialists, industrial

organization has for a decade been a battlefield.

The traditional mainstream

view-that

the competitive proc-

ess must be policed and curbed in certain directions if it is to

survive and perform its essential economic work; that effective

competition is ultimately rooted in the structure

of

markets and

industries; and that a key task

of

antitrust policy is to maintain

structurally competitive conditions against the depredations

of

oligopoly, monopoly, and concentration-inducing mergers and

acquisitions-has been assaulted by articulate iconoclasts armed

with grandiose assertions and bombastic claims.

Espousing "consumer welfare" and "efficiency,"

and

wrapped in the mantle

of

"science," the self-proclaimed advo-

cates

of

the so-called new learning have propagandized their

cause across the country with doctrinaire certitude in courtrooms

and ideological bootcamps for judges. Resurrecting the economic

Darwinism

of

a century ago, they have insisted that whatever is,

is best; that whatever happens, must happen; and that antitrust

efforts to maintain competitive market structures are sadly unin-

formed, woefully misguided, and dangerously counterproductive.

Thus, where they occur, oligopoly and monopoly industry

structures must, by the fact

of

their existence, be most effective in

©1991by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.