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Abstract This article offers an overview of selected developments in the law and economics of antitrust regulation of single‐firm strategies. The strategy generating the most cases historically is resale price maintenance. Here, the law has moved sharply in both Canada and the U.S. towards more solid economic foundations. Yet a gap between the law and economics remains. The economics of resale price maintenance is reviewed within a framework that is much simpler and more general than the existing literature. The law on a second strategy, predatory pricing, represents in my view a success story for the influence of economic theory in spite of the absence of a single accepted theory of predatory pricing. The remaining single‐firm strategies are concerned largely with the exclusion by a dominant firm of rivals from a market. I review, with application to cases, the two most basic questions concerning exclusionary strategies. Are exclusionary, anticompetitive contracts ever entered into voluntarily by market participants? On the other hand, is complete or substantial foreclosure of a market through exclusionary strategies necessarily anticompetitive?

The author examines the various arguments and legislative proposals offered in support of the regulation of campaign financing in light of the need for a democracy to protect free political communication and of current First Amendment doctrine. He concludes that the arguments advanced either lack a sufficient logical or empirical basis or are founded on ideas that are at odds with a system of free expression. Examination of the legislative proposals leads to the conclusion that they either limit political speech, disadvantage challengers seeking to unseat incumbents, or are too remotely related to valid legislative goals.

Relationship of the First Amendment to the use of money or in-kind resources for purposes of political communication.

In terms of solidifying the economic foundations of competition policy, Canadian merger law is much further advanced than merger law in any other jurisdiction. This article evaluates the developments in the Canadian law and draws both positive and negative lessons for integrating economic principles into merger law generally. The balancing weights test adopted in Canadian law for incorporating efficiencies into merger assessment has firm support in economics. But the implementation of this test has run into problems. A sharp wedge remains in Canada between the law and the economics of merger evaluation.

AbstractThis paper re‐examines the relationship between a firm's organizational form, not‐for‐profit versus for‐profit, and its output quality. The Arrow‐Hansmann theory of hidden action on the part of providers predicts higher quality for not‐for‐profit suppliers. This prediction has a puzzling lack of support in the empirical literature. We propose a theory that resolves the empirical puzzle and generates additional testable implications. The theory starts with the traditional assumptions of hidden action and supplier altruism. It then incorporates two additional features of real‐world markets: hidden information on supplier ability to provide high quality and a variation across buyers in the degree of informational asymmetry. The central prediction of the theory is that quality has a higher variance across for‐profits than across not‐for‐profits. Preliminary evidence from the US market for hospital care is consistent with this prediction.