Rejecting The Ordoliberal Standard Of Consumer Choice And Making Consumer Welfare The Hallmark Of An Antitrust Atlanticism

By Joseph V. Coniglio – 

Protecting consumer choice remains essential to the enforcement of European competition law. This article provides an overview of ordoliberalism as a theory of political economy and its relation to a consumer choice paradigm for competition policy, before turning to a critical discussion of ordoliberalism’s theoretical priors and practical standards for determining anticompetitive behavior. While an important chapter in the history of economic thought, the ordol