The Federal Trade Commission, Oligopoly, and Shared Monopoly

This paper, written for a centennial commemoration of the Federal Trade Commission's creation, reviews the history of two major cases-the tetracycline case of the 1950s and 1960s and the suit against four (eventually three) ready-to-eat breakfast cereal manufacturers in the 1970s. Those actions addressed one of the most difficult problems in U.S. antitrust jurisprudence: how to deal with the behavior of oligopolistic firms sufficiently few in number that they refrain from active price competition even without entering into explicit price-fixing agreements.