Antitrust Law and Regulatory Gaming

Stacey Dogan, Northeastern University School of Law, and Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School

11/03/2008
(Original Publish Date: 10/1/2008)

Antitrust law promotes competition in the service of economic efficiency. Government regulation may or may not promote either competition or efficiency, depending on both the goals of the agency and the effects of industry "capture." Antitrust courts have long included regulated industries within their purview, working to ensure that regulated industries could not use the limits that regulation imposes on the normal competitive process to achieve anticompetitive ends. Doing so makes sense; an antitrust law that ignored anticompetitive behavior in any regulated industry would be a law full of holes.