Though the major laws that guide US antitrust policy—the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act—have all been on the books for more than a century, academic, judicial, and regulatory attitudes toward the enforcement of antitrust have varied greatly over that time. For the past several decades, US antitrust enforcement has been increasingly passive following the ascendancy in the 1970s of the Chicago school of antitrust policy, which emphasized the risks of overintervention and argued for a narrowly tailored enforcement standard focused on economic metrics such as price, output, and efficiency.

The Chicago school of antitrust policy—named for a group of scholars associated with the University of Chicago including Nobel Laureates George Stigler and Milton Friedman, Richard Posner, and Robert Bork—coalesced on the heels of a period of antitrust enforcement that some now characterize as incoherent and, in some cases, harmful. But did Chicago school ideas come to dominate for half a century because they were simply that much better than what preceded them? Research by ETH Zurich postdoctoral scholar Filippo Lancieri, UChicago Law School’s Eric Posner (Richard Posner’s son), and Booth’s Luigi Zingales suggests that a key factor was lobbying by wealthy and powerful business interests.

The researchers started by questioning whether the success of the Chicago school was due to democratic support for its arguments. They examined polling data, presidential speeches, and related sources and find no evidence of a preference among voters for weaker antitrust enforcement, including during 1965–85, which saw the sharpest enforcement decline. “On the contrary,” they write, “throughout this period, the majority of Americans were solidly in favor of strong antitrust enforcement.”

Read more at Chicago Booth Review