The Science of Antitrust

FAIN: FEL-302660-25

Jennifer Jhun
Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)

Research and writing leading to three articles on defining and measuring market power and antitrust in modern democracies.

Antitrust analysis and regulation constitute an arena where questions of measurement, classification, theory, modeling, and the role of scientific expertise all meet. These are familiar topics in the discipline of philosophy of science, which studies not only the foundations and methods of scientific practice but also the role of values in scientific inquiry. The topic of antitrust, however, has received very little attention from philosophers of science, a gap that this interdisciplinary project proposes to redress. It unites several distinct philosophical subfields, such as the philosophy of science with political and social philosophy, and brings together the fields of philosophy, economics, and law in ways that have previously been unexplored. In particular, I address the questions of how to measure market power, how the market concept as understood has changed over time in the U.S., and the nature of the relationship between democracy and the market concept.