UC Berkeley

This essay conceptualizes market governance as a balance of power and discusses the implications for current debates over antitrust policy. This framework offers a way to interpret and evaluate the “neo-Brandeisian” school that views concentrated market power as a threat to democracy as well as to economic goals, such as productivity and innovation. It suggests that the government can deploy antitrust policy to alter the balance of power to promote the public welfare without necessarily impeding competition or otherwise distorting markets. And antitrust policies that constrain market power can have the double benefit of making both markets and politics more competitive.