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Antitrust merger policy suffers from a disconnect between its articulated concerns and the methodologies it employs. The Supreme Court has largely abandoned the field of horizontal merger analysis, leaving us with ancient decisions that have never been overruled but whose fundamental approach has been ignored or discredited. Only within the last generation has econometrics developed useful techniques for estimating the price impact of specific mergers in differentiated markets. Although the Supreme Court's Brown Shoe decision required a market definition, the Court was not thinking of a relevant market as a grouping of sales capable of being monopolized or cartelized. The perceived injury in Brown Shoe was not collusion, but rather that the postmerger firm would acquire a competitive advantage over its competitors. Indeed, Brown Shoe was a "unilateral effects" case in the sense that its concern was with the likelihood that the postmerger firm would be able to undersell other firms within the same market.

Since Oliver Williamson published Markets and Hierarchies, transaction cost economics (TCE) has claimed an important place in antitrust, avoiding the extremes of the structuralist school, which saw market structure as decisive, and the Chicago school, which found monopoly only infrequently and denied that a monopolist could leverage its power into related markets. Since the 1970s both the structuralist and Chicago positions have moved toward the center, partly as a result of TCE. Already in 1978 Areeda and Turner produced the first volumes of the Antitrust Law treatise, which completely repudiated the leverage theory and abandoned the structuralist and leveraging positions on vertical integration. TCE analysis of contractual restraints recognizes that an important threat to competition is double marginalization, which can occur when market power is held by separate firms with complementary outputs. Nevertheless, one comparative advantage of both structuralism and the Chicago school was their simplicity. TCE analysis is more specific to the situation, demanding close scrutiny when significant market power is either present or realistically threatened.

Since Oliver Williamson published Markets and Hierarchies, transaction cost economics (TCE) has claimed an important place in antitrust, avoiding the extremes of the structuralist school, which saw market structure as decisive, and the Chicago school, which found monopoly only infrequently and denied that a monopolist could leverage its power into related markets. Since the 1970s both the structuralist and Chicago positions have moved toward the center, partly as a result of TCE. Already in 1978 Areeda and Turner produced the first volumes of the Antitrust Law treatise, which completely repudiated the leverage theory and abandoned the structuralist and leveraging positions on vertical integration. TCE analysis of contractual restraints recognizes that an important threat to competition is double marginalization, which can occur when market power is held by separate firms with complementary outputs. Nevertheless, one comparative advantage of both structuralism and the Chicago school was their simplicity. TCE analysis is more specific to the situation, demanding close scrutiny when significant market power is either present or realistically threatened.