The turn to governance in antitrust law and policy; from doctrinal rules to experimentalist regimes

The dissertation examines the turn towards governance mechanisms in antitrust law and policy. The question addressed in each chapter is how antitrust law has responded to situations in which it becomes exceedingly difficult to develop rules that can be used to pursue legitimate antitrust policy objectives across different implementation contexts. The problem arises for at least two reasons. Specific or narrow antitrust rules may be difficult to develop ex ante so that they can be easily applied across many industries that are both heterogeneous and highly dynamic. By contrast, if the rules were to take the form of more general and malleable standards, we face the problems of ensuring the accountability of the decision-makers as well as the constraint imposed by their capacity and expertise to evaluate the competitive significance of conduct and to craft appropriate remedies. The dissertation examines the mechanisms that have emerged to respond to the problem in three settings. While the three contexts are different, the emerging mechanisms share a set of common features and represent a move away from principal-agent models of regulation towards the development of regimes for exchanging problem-solving information.