The Chicago School, said to have influenced antitrust analysis inescapably, is associated today with a set of ideas and arguments about the goal of antitrust law. In particular, the Chicago School is known for asserting that economic efficiency is and should be the only purpose of antitrust law and that the neoclassical price theory model offers the best policy tool for maximizing economic efficiency in the real world; that corporate actions, including various vertical restraints, are efficient and welfare-increasing; that markets are self-correcting and monopoly is merely an occasional, unstable, and transitory outcome of the competitive process; and that governmental cures for the rare cases where markets fail to self-correct tend to be “worse than the disease.”
May
2025