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This is the first paper in a volume devoted exclusively to antitrust law and economics. It summarizes the other papers and addresses two issues. First, after showing that the federal courts generally view consumer welfare as the ultimate goal of antitrust law, it asks what they mean by that term. It concludes that recent decisions appear more likely to equate consumer welfare with the well-being of consumers in the relevant market than with economic efficiency. Second, it asks whether a buyer must possess monopsony power to induce a price discrimination that is not cost justified. It concludes that a buyer can often obtain an unjustified concession simply by wielding bargaining power, but the resulting concession may frequently – though not always – improve consumer welfare.

The U.S. 2009 Tobacco Control Act opened the door for new antismoking policies by giving the Food and Drug Administration broad regulatory authority over the tobacco industry. We develop a behavioral welfare economics approach to conduct cost-benefit analysis of FDA tobacco regulations. We use a simple two-period model to develop expressions for the impact of tobacco control policies on social welfare. Our model includes: nudge and paternalistic regulations; an excise tax on cigarettes; internalities created by period 1 versus period 2 consumption; and externalities from cigarette consumption. Our analytical expressions show that in the presence of uncorrected internalities and externalities, a nudge or a tax to reduce cigarette consumption improves social welfare. In sharp contrast, a paternalistic regulation might either improve or worsen social welfare. Another important result is that the social welfare gains from new policies do not only depend on the size of the internalities and externalities, but also depend on the extent to which current policies already correct the problems. We link our analytical expressions to the graphical approach used in most previous studies and discuss the information needed to complete cost-benefit analysis of tobacco regulations. We use our model as a framework to reexamine the evidence base for strong conclusions about the size of the internalities, which is the key information needed.

The causal relationship between the size of welfare benefits and the birth decisions of women on welfare has been explored in a number of studies using a variety of analytical approaches applied to vital statistics data, data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, or similar survey data. These studies typically use non-experimental methods to relate differences in birth rates or birth decisions across states to differences in welfare benefits levels. Analyses of this type have been criticized on several grounds. Benefits across states may be correlated with unobserved interstate differences that may also be related to birth decisions. Very often, these studies measure the key independent variable, welfare benefits level, as the cash benefit guarantee under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program for a household of fixed size, varying this amount by state of residence. Actual benefits paid will vary with household size, number of AFDC-eligible household members, other sources of income, and other factors.

The welfare state is certainly paradoxical. On the one hand, it is extraordinary mundane, concerned with the minutiae of the pension and benefit rights of millions of citizens. On the other, the sheer scale of its growth is one of the most remarkable features of the post-war capitalist world and it remains on of the dominant, if sometimes unnoticed, institutions of the modern world. (Pierson, 1998, p. 208)

These reforms offer a vision of a fairer welfare system where truly no one is written off, where nearly everyone is preparing or looking for work, where everyone is treated as an individual and gets the support they need. More importantly, these reforms point the way to a fairer society where children don't grow up in poverty, where disabled people enjoy real equality, and everyone is given real help to overcome the barriers to achieving their full potential. (DWP, 2008, p. 8)Workfare has finally arrived in the UK, but not with trumpet blasts of outrage: it's been smuggled in with lofty rhetoric about ‘personalisation’, ‘individually tailored’ advice and support which will enable people to ‘take control of their journey to work'. (Bunting, 2009)