Competition Overdose

How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us from Citizen Kings to Market Servants

By: Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

Narrated by: Steve Wojtas

Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Using dozens of vivid examples to show how society overprescribed competition as a solution and when unbridled rivalry hurts consumers, kills entrepreneurship, and increases economic inequality, two free-market thinkers diagnose the sickness caused by competition overdose and provide remedies that will promote sustainable growth and progress for everyone, not just wealthy shareholders and those at the top.

Whatever illness our society suffers, competition is the remedy. Do we want better schools for our children? Cheaper prices for everything? More choices in the marketplace? The answer is always: Increase competition.

Yet, many of us are unhappy with the results. We think we’re paying less, but we’re getting much less. Our food has undeclared additives (or worse), our drinking water contains toxic chemicals, our hotel bills reveal surprise additions, our kids’ schools are failing, our activities are tracked so that advertisers can target us with relentless promotions. All will be cured, we are told, by increasing the competitive pressure and defanging the bloated regulatory state.

In a captivating exposé, Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi show how we are falling prey to greed, chicanery, and cronyism. Refuting the almost religious belief in rivalry as the vehicle for prosperity, the authors identify the powerful corporations, lobbyists, and lawmakers responsible for pushing this toxic competition - and argue instead for a healthier, even nobler, form of competition.

Competition Overdose diagnoses the disease - and provides a cure for it.

©2020 Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi (P)2020 HarperAudio

Thought Provoking But Often Assumes Causation

Part II of this book discloses the obscene “arms race of college sports” as illustrated by the Univ. of TN’s $45M expenditure on a football practice facility “while other parts of the university were in need of repair” and by average head football coach salaries exceeding $5.7M at top 20 universities. The book explains how our misguided antitrust laws prohibit any practical solution to this problem.

A recurring theme of this book is that a consumer who is too lazy, irresponsible, or innumerate to analyze a purchase is being exploited. Chapter 3 describes a “bargaining hunting antitrust professor” who reserved a Las Vega hotel room without reviewing the applicable fees and who failed to pay his credit card bill on time because “so much work had piled up” while “he was away on vacation.” Wow! Even an antitrust professor is exploited by late fees resulting from his failure to pay his bills on time.

Although Part I of this book purports to show the negative impact of increased competition, many examples provided fail to support that thesis. Early decision constraints that universities impose upon their applicants are a form of reduced (not increased) competition. Consumers’ subjective correlation between price and quality is not a function of the number of competitors e.g. consumers paid more for Michelob than for Budweiser long before the explosive growth of craft beers. Buyers’ undervaluation of used cars is well documented in behavioral economics as resulting from information asymmetry between buyer and seller. The inability of shoppers to quantitatively compare discounts results from innumeracy. Drip pricing exists because it is profitable, independent of the number of sellers. The authors failed to establish that these “problems” increased with the number of competitors. In several cases where the authors assert a causal relationship between a problem and increased competition, it is mere ipse dixit.

Excellent

I gave this book full marks not just because it is really good but it does a great job of looking at the current economic problems from a different perspective. We constantly find ourselves deluded with false dichotomies such as "capitalism versus socialism" and "free-market versus regulated" etc. This book offers an excellent perspective from the point of competition showing that it can be both good and bad depending on how we create or rig the rules. I believe in the value of competition but for years have seen the down size as well. These authors do an excellent job of working through these issues. While much of the material is not new the value is in the different perspective that challenges the "all competition is good" hypothesis that plagues so much of our society.