In this essay, the author examines the ability of a government-owned firm to behave anticompetitively and considers postal services in particular.

An increasingly frequent theme sounded in competition policy throughout the world’s developed economies is that public enterprises are engaged in anticompetitive behavior aimed at private enterprises. In the United States, government enterprises, such as the U.S. Postal Service and the Tennessee Valley Authority, and government-sponsored enterprises, such as...

In a recent Joint Center study, David E. M. Sappington and J. Gregory Sidak argue that because public enterprises do not typically seek to maximize profits, incentives exist for those enterprises to undertake activities that disadvantage competitors. Those activities include setting prices below marginal cost, raising the...

Quick: How many kinds of gasoline do we use in America? Most people would say three or six: regular unleaded, mid-grade, and premium, along with the ethanol blends of the same that have become nearly universal. The actual number is somewhere above 45, though hard to pin down exactly, according...

Antitrust has focused heavily on issues of "vertical restraints"—everything from, for example, giving distributors exclusive sales territories to tying access of one product to the purchase of another. A few decades ago, legal opinion almost uniformly viewed these vertical restraints as anticompetitive. Today, however, both the courts and...

Does price competition exist in the mutual fund industry? If so, is it too weak to prevent anticompetitive pricing by investment advisors to retail investors?

Joesph Antos' statement on premium support for Medicare before the House Committee on Ways and Means' Subcommittee on Health

The authors analyze, and reject as unpersuasive, the putative benefits of mandatory structural separation.