Chapter 19 — Further Reading

On monopoly theory

Joan Robinson, The Economics of Imperfect Competition, Macmillan, 1933 Robinson's book, published the same year as Chamberlin's, independently developed the theory of monopoly pricing and price discrimination. The MR < P result and the monopolist's pricing diagram are most clearly derived here.

Hal Varian, Intermediate Microeconomics, W. W. Norton Chapters 24–26 cover monopoly, monopoly behavior, and price discrimination with mathematical rigor.

On antitrust and Big Tech (case study 1)

Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Columbia Global Reports, 2018 Wu, a Columbia Law professor who served in the Biden White House, makes the case for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. The book is short, clear, and influential.

Lina Khan, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Yale Law Journal, 2017 The law-review article that launched Khan's career and eventually led to her appointment as FTC Chair. Khan argues that the consumer-welfare standard is inadequate for evaluating Amazon's market power.

Herbert Hovenkamp, Federal Antitrust Policy: The Law of Competition and Its Practice, West Academic, 6th edition, 2020 The standard legal treatise on U.S. antitrust law. Comprehensive and authoritative.

Jonathan Baker, The Antitrust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy, Harvard University Press, 2019 Baker, a Georgetown Law professor and former FTC chief economist, argues for revitalizing antitrust enforcement without abandoning the consumer-welfare framework entirely.

U.S. v. Google LLC, No. 1:20-cv-03010 (D.D.C. 2024) The court opinion in the Google search monopoly case. Available free online. Long but the "Findings of Fact" and "Conclusions of Law" sections are accessible.

On price discrimination (case study 2)

Hal Varian, "Price Discrimination," in Handbook of Industrial Organization, 1989 The definitive academic survey of price discrimination. Technical but comprehensive.

Robert Phillips, Pricing and Revenue Optimization, Stanford Business Books, 2005 A practitioner-oriented book on yield management and dynamic pricing, with detailed treatment of airline pricing.

Andrew Odlyzko, "Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet," First Monday, 2003 An early and influential paper on how digital platforms use data to enable personalized pricing — the intersection of price discrimination and privacy.

On natural monopoly and regulation

W. Kip Viscusi, Joseph Harrington, and David Sappington, Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, MIT Press, 5th edition, 2018 The standard textbook on regulatory economics, including natural monopoly regulation.

Alfred Kahn, The Economics of Regulation, MIT Press, 1988 The classic treatment of utility regulation. Kahn, who later led the deregulation of the airline industry, wrote the definitive framework for understanding how to regulate natural monopolies.

On network effects

Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Harvard Business School Press, 1999 Written before the social-media era but still the clearest treatment of network effects, switching costs, and platform economics. Many of the insights apply directly to Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms, Harvard Business Review Press, 2016 A treatment of platform economics with specific application to tech monopolies.

On the history of antitrust

Richard Hofstadter, "What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?" in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 1964 A historian's account of the rise and decline of the antitrust movement in the U.S. Useful for understanding why enforcement was strong in the early 20th century and weaker by the late 20th.

Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox, Basic Books, 1978 The book that defined the consumer-welfare standard and shaped antitrust policy for 40 years. Bork argued that antitrust should focus only on consumer welfare (prices and output), not on competition for its own sake. Enormously influential and now being challenged.

A reading order recommendation

If you have time for one of the sources above, read Tim Wu's The Curse of Bigness. It's short (about 150 pages), argues a clear thesis, and gives you the political and intellectual context for the current antitrust debate.

If you want the legal perspective on the Google case, read Lina Khan's "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" — it's the most influential legal-academic piece on tech antitrust.

If you want the economics of price discrimination, read Varian's 1989 survey or Phillips's Pricing and Revenue Optimization.

Chapter 20 — Monopolistic Competition and Oligopoly: The Messy Middle — is next. It covers the market structures that most real markets actually inhabit: many firms with differentiated products (monopolistic competition) and a few large firms watching each other (oligopoly, with game theory).