Quantitative indexes of monopoly and problems of their implementation in antitrust regulation

Abstract

We considered the quantitative indexes to control different monopoly’s types and identified the main disadvantages, which obstacle the usage of these indicators in practice of the antitrust regulation. Economic methods of antitrust control can be divided into two groups: (1) direct and (2) indirect. The direct ones are based on the market and competitive prices analysis, marginal revenue (MR) and marginal costs (MC) and theoretically, they permit to evaluate directly the negative monopoly’s impact on the market. Indirect methods are based on the non-price indexes (for instance, concentration or share of the firm on market) and identify only the potential hazard from monopoly. However they do not permit to determine whether monopoly indeed negatively impacts on market and in addition the level of such impact. By analyzing of some disadvantages of the monopoly control indexes, we determined several main features, which should have belonged to the new more perfect monopoly index, which would be the subject of our further investigation: (1) to be a dynamic (not a static one) quantitative index of the monopoly power, which evaluates both the fact of the monopoly power existence and the level of the power’s manifestation on the different hierarchical levels (economy, industry, firm) in the mode of real time; (2) to have a capability to separate in the new indicator the innovational component of the monopolist’s costs on the different hierarchical stages; (3) to display the correlation between the monopoly’s power index and the business cycle phases, since the level of the negative monopoly’s impact may be intensified in the recession phase and may be weakened in the recovery phase; (4) to perform the direct control of monopoly through the control of the difference between the market and “natural” (competitive) prices. This control could be realized permanently, actually in “on-line” mode. As compared to indirect methods (which are discrete ones), the price control does not require the confidential information of a firm’s activity, which is often unavailable for the regulator.
 JEL classіfіcatіon: D40, D41, D42, D43