IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jcomle/v12y2016i3p427-442..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Uncertain Welfare Effects Of Railroad Competition And Railroad Regulation, 1870-1900

Author

Listed:
  • George L. Priest

Abstract

This essay, written for a memorial contribution on the works of Paul W. MacAvoy, discusses MacAvoy's first book, The Economic Effects of Regulation (1965), which addresses eastern railroad cartels in the United States between 1870 and 1900. The essay describes the many achievements of this book in terms of detecting and measuring cheating on cartel prices and its discussion of cartel practices of greater or lesser success. The essay also compares railroad practices for chiefly the transport of grain from Chicago to New York to practices over the same period for the transport of refined oil from Pittsburgh and Cleveland to various locations on the east coast. The principal difference as between grain and oil transport was the existence of competitive markets for grain shipment versus the monopsony of the Standard Oil Company over the shipment of refined oil. The net welfare effects of the grain cartels versus the oil monopsony remain unclear.

Suggested Citation

  • George L. Priest, 2016. "The Uncertain Welfare Effects Of Railroad Competition And Railroad Regulation, 1870-1900," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 12(3), pages 427-442.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:12:y:2016:i:3:p:427-442.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/joclec/nhw012
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L12 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Monopoly; Monopolization Strategies
    • L16 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics; Macroeconomic Industrial Structure
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices
    • L51 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - Economics of Regulation
    • L92 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Transportation and Utilities - - - Railroads and Other Surface Transportation
    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • K23 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Regulated Industries and Administrative Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:12:y:2016:i:3:p:427-442.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jcle .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.