What happens when electric utility monopolies pursue their acquisition interests—undisciplined by competition, and insufficiently disciplined by the regulators responsible for replicating competition? Since the mid-1980s, mergers and acquisitions of U.S. electric utilities have halved the number of local, independent utilities. Mostly debt-financed, these transactions have converted retiree-suitable investments into subsidiaries of geographically scattered conglomerates. Written by one of the U.S.’s leading regulatory thinkers, this book combines legal, accounting, economic and financial analysis of the 30-year march of U.S. electricity mergers with insights from the dynamic field of behavioral economics.

As a veteran of both the Bureau of Economics of the Federal Trade Commission and the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly during the 1960s, author Blair is an advocate. His advocacy of his position is clear, concise, and understandable: he favors strong antitrust laws and the stricter application of those laws to existing corporate structures, and this is his argument. First, it defines and discusses four types of economic concentration-market, vertical, conglomerate, and aggregate. Second, high concentration (as opposed to diffusion of control) is shown to be neither the necessary nor the "natural" state of the economy because "centrifugal" forces (eventual diseconomies of scale, growth, and technological change) constantly are chipping away at dominance and ossification. Third, it argues that the primary causes of high and rising concentration of various kinds are neither natural nor technological imperatives (economies of scale, technological change): rather, they are artificial and unnecessary "centripetal" factors, the most important being mergers, acquisitions, TV advertising, predation, and anticompetitive government policies of various kinds. The result, therefore, is a work rich in empirical information and skillful in interpreting and verifying new data and statistical approaches; moreover, it integrates a substantial quantity of data never attempted in this area in the past. In this sense it is an excellent contribution. No topic considered has been shortchanged, the treatment is competent. But the effort to cover the entire waterfront leaves several urgent questions: What can be done and where? How may we attempt new approaches to our subject? How may we first better convince the general public and Congress that, indeed, a strong antitrust policy is desirable?