A Legal Attack on Oligopoly Pricing: The Automobile Fleet Sales Case
Antitrust law has been one of the important parts of U.S. policy trying to encourage desirable performance in markets and industries. It has had its strongest effect in discouraging explicit communication and collusion among rivals or competitors and hence in preventing the cartelization of industries that otherwise would be structurally competitive. But it has failed to deal effectively with the problem of oligopoly. Section 1 of the Sherman Act forbids "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade, or commerce among the several States." Section 2 is aimed at "every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine with any other persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States." But neither section has been generally applicable to industries whose numbers are few enough so that they do not need to communicate explicitly to reach results that approximate a joint monopoly outcome. Section l's "contract, combination . . . or conspiracy" has been interpreted by the courts to exclude "conscious parallelism" by itself; and Section 2's "monopolizing" has been interpreted as a