Introduction to Harberger’s Monopoly and Resource Allocation–The Pioneering Article on Deadweight Loss and Empirical Measurement of the Social Costs of Monopoly

By Hill Wellford

Arnold Harberger´s 1954 article, Monopoly and Resource Allocation,brought empirical analysis of the social costs of monopoly into the mainstream of antitrust work. In the mid-twentieth century, the dominant mode of monopoly analysis in the United States (and therefore worldwide) was structural rather than empirical, and that structural approach supported a highly interventionist antitrust regime.