Monopoly Politics: Competition and Learning in the Evolution of Policy Regimes

In Monopoly Politics, Erik Peinert provides a macro-historical explanation for why American and international markets are today monopolized by an ever-narrowing group of companies.Using original archival evidence from the United States and France, and borrowing insights from microeconomics, bureaucratic politics, sociology, psychology, and law, Peinert demonstrates how government policy towards competition and monopoly changes at key moments in the 20th century.Centrally, policy changes as a result of the interaction between staff turnover in policy circles and the diminishing returns to policy regimes. As policy regimes across different arenas such as antitrust, intellectual property, trade, and industrial policy push consistently either in favor of competition or monopoly, they generate diminishing returns.Unsustainably pushing for competition suppresses profits and destabilizes markets, whereas pushing to defend market power will raise prices, stifle innovation, and concentrate prof