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The current interest in industrial concentration studies almost rivals that which gave rise to the Temporary National Economic Committee's voluminous output on the subject two decades ago. Indeed,by almost any standard, 1957 was a banner year. The Federal Trade Commission opened the season with its 656-page report in January. The National Industrial Conference Board devoted a session to the topic at its forty-first annual meeting in May. In July the Bureau of the Census published its study performed at the request of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly. In June the Chamber of Commerce of the United States issued its first in a projected series of reports on the measurement of concentration; the second followed in July; others are still to come. Meanwhile, the output of economists in the professional journals has continued apace. But the recent literature on concentration differs significantly from the earlier studies. Gardiner C. Means, who is often credited with having inaugurated the systematic study of concentration with his 1931 article, set the tune for much that was to follow: "within 'the corporate system' there exists a centripetal attraction which draws wealth together into aggregations of constantly increasing size . . .the trend is apparent, and no limit is yet in sight." The Federal Trade Commission was still echoing the same tune seventeen years later: "If nothing is done to check the growth in concentration either the giant corporations will ultimately take over the country, or the government will be impelled to step in . "

"Divestiture" as applied to the oil industry has now clearly come to mean different things to different people, and often different things to the same people. On the one hand it has taken on all the attributes of a political slogan, very much like the "free silver"battle cry of the 1890's. It inspired the introduction of over twenty bills in the Ninety-Fifth Congress and served as a plank in the Democratic Party's platform of 1976, providing the one rallying point for the dozen or so candidates who sought the party's presidential nomination. In fact, during the autumn of 1976 political television advertisements proclaiming some candidates' support of oil company divestiture rained upon the viewing public with all the aesthetic elegance we associate with toothpaste and deodorant commercials-reaching a rather confusing high point with candidate Fred Harris's vow to break up the eighteen "oil monopolies." . In this Article, we plan to analyze the divestiture issue in more conventional, industrial-organization terms.' It is generally agreed that divestiture is an appropriate antitrust remedy for excessive market power when such power gives its possessor a means of excluding competition and controlling price. Stated in the language of industrial organization, the purpose of divestiture is to break up the interfirm modus operandi, described variously as oligopolistic rationalization, conjectural interdependence, conscious parallelism, or tacit collusive behavior, that is commonly associated with highly concentrated industries containing a small number of competitively forebearing rivals.'