The “Antitrust Revolution” and The Antitrust Revolution: A Perspective from the Inside

• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X20950202
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Published date: 01 December 2020

Article

The “Antitrust Revolution”

and The Antitrust Revolution:

A Perspective from the Inside

John Kwoka* and Lawrence J. White**

Abstract

There clearly has been a revolution in the way that modern microeconomics has come to occupy a

central role in the development of antitrust policy and in the structuring of antitrust cases over the past

forty years or so. And during the past thirty plus years, there have been seven editions of The Antitrust

Revolution that we have edited. In this essay, we offer our perspective on the “antitrust revolution,” as

well as provide an insiders’ view of those seven editions and how they came to be.

Keywords

antitrust, revolution, merger guidelines

I. Introduction

When Bill Curran asked if we would be interested in contributing an essay to this symposium, we were

pleased to be able to join the distinguished group of scholars that he had gathered for the symposium.

We felt that we could offer a unique perspective: as the coeditors of all seven editions of The Antitrust

Revolution, but also as participants in the “antitrust revolution” itself, as economists at the Antitrust

Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as

economics experts in a number of government-initiat ed and private antitrust lawsuits, and as the

authors of articles on antitrust economics that have been published in economics and law journals,

as well as book chapters.

That perspective is what we will try to offer in this essay. Since the central ideas that guided the

development of the book (which will be described in Section III) were formulated in the mid-1980s, it

will be useful to start by offering a brief review of what the environment of antitrust economics looked

like shortly before then; we will take the late 1970s as that initial point but also describe the changes

that began in the early 1980s since many observers at the time—both critics and supporters of the

changes—could see that major changes were beginning to occur. We will follow with another brief

review—this time providing our perspective on the state of antitrust economics circa 2020 and thus

* Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

** Stern School of Business, New York University, New York,NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

John Kwoka, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA.

Email: j.kwoka@northeastern.edu

The Antitrust Bulletin

2020, Vol. 65(4) 491–498

ªThe Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0003603X20950202

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