The Current State of the Law and Economics of Predatory Pricing
回顾了Areeda-Turner测试提出近20年来关于掠夺性定价的法学与经济学争论，并介绍了博弈论模型如何证明掠夺性定价的理性基础，对反垄断政策制定者和产业组织研究者有参考价值。
It has been almost 20 years since Phillip Areeda and Donald F. Turner introduced their proposals for antitrust policy toward predatory pricing. Their 1975 Harvard Law Review article, Predatory Pricing and Related Practices under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, sparked a lively debate among legal scholars and economists that continued, mostly in law reviews, for several years. The controversy focused on the core Areeda-Turner (AT) test, which put forward short-run marginal cost as the appropriate, but difficult-to-measure, standard of a lawful price and recommended reasonably anticipated average variable cost as a surrogate. The discussion included consideration of other cost-based measures, as well as alternative rules restricting dominant-firm pricing and output policies and both structured and open-textured rule-of-reason analyses. The controversy also helped to illuminate the qualifications that Areeda and Turner imposed on their proposal. One of the central issues in the debate concerning the AT test was whether or not it gave sufficient weight to the dynamic and strategic character of predatory pricing. All the participants in the discussion, including Areeda and Turner themselves, recognized that since the essence of predatory pricing is the predator's sacrifice of short-run gains for longer-run gains (and consequent harm to the public), the problem being addressed is inherently strategic. The lawyers and economists engaged in the debate differed, however, about whether anything practical could be done to cope with the intertemporal strategic issues. Areeda and Turner's reliance on a static model of dominant-firm behavior to derive their test reflected their doubt that a sound legal rule could be fashioned to cope with the inherently speculative and indeterminate assessment of longrun considerations. Curiously enough, just as the debate in the law reviews was winding down, the market-organization literature was beginning to see an infusion of contributions that used modern game-theoretic concepts and techniques to analyze well-specified models of strategic firm behavior in oligopolistic markets. In particular, several important contributions analyzed models of markets in which predatory pricing emerged as part of a set of equilibrium strategies. These contributions effectively undermined the view that, because of its costs to the would-be predator, predation is irrational and hence not likely to occur. This work is well categorized and well surveyed in the chapter that Janusz Ordover and Garth Saloner (1989) contributed to The Handbook of Industrial Organization. A central feature of this class of models is some asymmetry of information between market actors. The dominant incumbent firm is better informed than its smaller rival in models where the predator induces exit of competitors; the incumbent is better informed than potential entrants in models where predation takes the form of entry deterrence; and firms in general are better informed about their prospects than are their sources of financing. The new market-organization literature on predation offered three major types of models. First, there were well-developed game-theoretic analyses of the long-purse or deep-pocket theories of predation, theories which Lester G. Telser (1966) had analyzed earlier in a perfect-information tDiscussants: Paul Joskow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Joseph Stiglitz, Stanford University.