From Chicago School To Post-chicago School: Theoretical Transition And Its Influence Over Antitrust Policy

Antitrust Law has seldom suffered from a shortage of industrial organization theories. Antitrust Law protects competition as a special law, and its development and implemention should be based on industrial organization theory. The United States is the world's first country to develop antitrust regulations, and also has the most stringent anti-monopoly policy in the world. In its hundred years of antitrust history, there have been several schools of antitrust thought, such as Populist School, Harvard School, Chicago School and Austrian School and so on. However, the theoretical development of the nearest in terms of recent years, the course of the development from the Chicago School to post-Chicago School reflects the evolution of U.S. antitrust thinking and the latest developments.In China, with rapid economic development, antitrust issues become prominent in economic activity and attract people's attention. Antitrust policy formulation and implementation must be careful and reasonable, otherwise it will affect the efficiency and the normal operation of market mechanisms. Initially introduced in the current period of antitrust law, the development and change of U.S. antitrust thinking has important implications in the improvement and implementation of anti-trust law, Therefore, antitrust economics in recent years has become a hot academic area, and the theory of industrial organization school which antitrust policy is closely related to began to be taken seriously. Chicago School, as the earlier antitrust policy has been widely thought as the mainstream attention, but the rise of the post-Chicago school and its contrast with the Chicago School system research, is relatively weak.This article explored U.S. antitrust policy in recent decades along the development and evolution process from the Chicago School to post-Chicago School's theory, and described the rise of the Chicago School, Chicago revolution, defects of Chicago School theory, the rise of the post-Chicago School and its main theory, and compared the similarities and differences between Chicago School and post-Chicago School antitrust policy. The article also quoted some antitrust policy cases which reflected the affections of different theories, and also some cases reflected how antitrust policy changed from the Chicago School to post-Chicago School. In the end, the author also discussed the relation between the evolution of industrial theory and development of changes in antitrust policy, and put forward some suggestions of antitrust policy.Chicago School and post-Chicago School both agree that the essence of antitrust is an economic issue and advocate the use of economics methods and theories to analyze antitrust issues in practice, but they have different understandings of the defining of anti-rust and monopolistic practices. The development from Chicago School to post-Chicago School is not the simple regression of antitrust thinking, but a spiral rising. The Chicago School offered an elegant, pro-market and largely anti-government vision of antitrust policy. To oversimplify, its advocates believed that markets were far more robust than people had previously imagined. They didn't realize the reality of economic phenomena, and the practice of antitrust. But post-Chicago put forward the essential characteristics of the real market, they use new economics tools such as game theory to explain the shortcomings of market mechanisms, with its solid theoretical foundation, improved the antitrust thinking of defects. In recent years, "post-Chicago era" may be upon antitrust policy.Because the United States and China antitrust policy have different logic and starting points, the United States and China antitrust policy have both similarity and distinction. U.S. antitrust policy is to free competition in the market monopolized by the birth process of a product. But Chinese antitrust policy, by contrast, first, state monopoly and administrative monopoly, and then gradually changed toward the market competition. China should abandon the previous government planned economy, and the traditional thinking of intervention, to let the market work freely. Administrative monopoly is an important antitrust problem, and the antitrust policy should take strict monopoly regulation to avoid government action causing large number of restrictions on competition and the destruction of the allocation of resources.