Reflections on Antitrust

• Published date: 01 September 2012
• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X1205700302
• Date: 01 September 2012
• Author: Oliver E. Williamson
• Subject Matter: Article

THE ANTITRUST BULLETIN: Vol. 55, No. 3/Fall 2010 : 543
Reflections on Antitrust
BY OLIVER E. WILLIAMSON*
Antitrust played an important role in my professional career as an
applied microeconomist with interests in firm and market
organization. Especially relevant to my research and teaching were
the three years (1960–63) that I spent as a Ph.D. student at the
Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now the Tepper
School) at Carnegie-Mellon University and the time (1966–67) that I
spent as Special Economic Assistant to the Head of the Antitrust
Division, U.S. Department of Justice.
What I have referred to as the Carnegie Triple was this: be disci-
plined; be interdisciplinary; have an active mind. I have taken this to
mean take your main discipline (in my case, economics) seriously;
maintain contact with the phenomena by crossing interdisciplinary
boundaries if and as the phenomenon in question has interdiscipli-
nary attributes (in my case, organization theory and contract law);
and ask the question “What’s going on here?” rather than pronounce
“This is the Law here!” when confronted with a puzzle. The stunning
research atmospherics provided students at Carnegie with an excep-
tional research foundation. As Jacques Drèze has put it, “never since
have I experienced such intellectual excitement.”1
*
Professor of the Graduate School and Edgar F. Kaiser Professor
Emeritus of Business, Economics, and Law, Haas School of Business,
University of California, Berkeley.
1
Jacques Drèze, Forty Years of Public Economics: A Personal Perspective, 9
J. ECON. PERSPS. 111 (1995).
© 2010 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.

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544 : T H E A N T I T R U S T B U L L E T I N : Vol. 55, No. 3/Fall 2010
The talent at the Antitrust Division was likewise stunning: Don-
ald Turner was the Assistant Attorney General, Edwin Zimmerman
was the Deputy, Lionel Kestenbaum headed the Evaluation Section,
Stephen Breyer was...