Toward an Empirical and Theoretical Assessment of Private Antitrust Enforcement

The predominant view in the antitrust field has been that private enforcement, and especially class action cases, yields little or no positive results. This Article analyzes these twenty cases, compares and contrasts their analysis with that of our earlier group of forty cases, and draws new insights from the results of all sixty combined. This Article demonstrate that private antitrust litigation has provided a substantial amount of compensation for victims of anticompetitive behavior: at least $33.8 to $35.8 billion. The studies also demonstrate that private antitrust enforcement has had an extremely strong deterrent effect.

In fact, this research demonstrates that private enforcement probably deters more anticompetitive behavior than even the appropriately acclaimed anti-cartel program of the DOJ Antitrust Division.