Hillary Greene

The Influences of Strategic Management on Antitrust Discourse

This article examines how antitrust law and policy can benefit from ideas developed in the academic strategy field. Because accurate assessment and prediction of the effects of firm conduct depend in part on understanding individual firm capabilities, knowledge from the strategy field and other business fields complements the contributions from industrial organization economics (IO). These business fields also offer theoretical and empirical challenges to the IO paradigm, which dominates antitrust analysis. The article begins with a comparison between strategy and IO and then illustrates how the strategy field can contribute to antitrust merger analysis. The article then assesses the influence of the strategy field on antitrust law and scholarship based on a citation analysis, which reveals little evidence of influence. It concludes with an examination of the likely impediments to the diffusion of strategy field ideas into antitrust.

Navigating Natural Monopolies: Market Strategy and Nonmarket Challenges in Radio and Television Audience Measurement Markets

This paper explores how firms within the audience measurement industry, specifically its radio and television markets, have navigated myriad market and nonmarket challenges. The market strategies and the nonmarket forces that constrain those strategies are largely defined by two features: the delineation of its geographic markets by political boundaries and markets that have natural monopoly characteristics. While the pre-monopoly stage or periods of competition may be comparatively short-lived, they are still telling. Monopolists undertake market strategies designed to ensure that they are not supplanted and nonmarket actions geared to avoiding undesirable constraints and reputational damage. Depending on their legal and regulatory environment, customers of the measurement services have used both market and nonmarket actions to mitigate the market power of the audience measurement firms. This paper focuses primarily on the U.S. radio and television audience measurement markets that Arbitron and Nielsen, respectively, have dominated for decades. Non-U.S. markets, which frequently feature America’s foremost firms, illustrate alternatives to America’s largely laissez-faire approach.