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Article Excerpt
I. INTRODUCTION
Predicting the competitive and economic impacts of business conduct and relationships (1) ranging from horizontal marketing joint ventures to vertical restraints demands an assessment and understanding of "immeasurable dynamic relationships." (2) Despite the assiduous efforts of economists and lawyers to bring order and predictability to the competitive effects evaluation process, antitrust regulation and decisionmaking are guided as much by assumptions and values, as they are by neutral economic or scientific principles.
Can antitrust and competition lawyers and economists look to modern science for guidance? As shown by the surrounding Antitrust Bulletin articles, several commentators have recommended looking to the emergent scientific field of complexity theory, as well as evolutionary biology. Their noble and creative efforts have been useful in emphasizing the importance of competition and diversity in creating and maintaining productive and stable economic systems and in identifying potential emergent forms of economic order. Continuing efforts to employ rigorous multidisciplinary thinking in addressing antitrust and competition issues should be encouraged.
We must be careful, however, not to misapply scientific and biological metaphors in seeking to support values-driven economic conclusions. In The Keystone Advantage, (3) Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien seek to bolster Milton Friedman's and the Chicago school's efficiencies and concentration values-driven defense of monopoly through a biological metaphor. They argue that dominant business firms and monopolies should be shielded from antitrust regulations because they are analogous to keystone species in biological ecosystems.
The Keystone Advantage's biological metaphor is facially compelling, but ultimately unsupported by sound biological principles or evidence. Indeed, biological studies show that ongoing aggressive horizontal competition at all levels, including the keystone level, is critical to building and maintaining healthy, stable, and productive ecosystems.
Unlike biological ecosystems, our economic system is based upon voluntary contractual relationships. Fairness and ethical behavior are crucial to maintaining the long-term health and stability of our economic system. Antitrust regulation of monopolies protects the integrity of our economic system by promoting fair and ethical competition and contractual dealings.
We should continue to look to the teachings of complexity science, chaos theory, and evolutionary biology to better understand our complex competitive economic system and to identify potential emergent forms of order. In so doing, we will gain a greater appreciation for the importance of diversity and ongoing competition at all levels of our economic system. We also must keep foremost in mind that effective antitrust regulation requires a continuing effort to delicately balance conflicting implied values such as freedom and fairness, competition and collaboration, and diversity and efficiency.
II. COMPLEXITY SCIENCE, CHAOS THEORY, AND COMPETITION
Biologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, On Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990, with Bert Holldabler), believes that "[t]he greatest challenge today, not just in cell biology and ecology, but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems." (4) Complexity theory seeks to go beyond breaking down complex systems and describing their underlying elements and forces, to creating mathematical models that describe the emergent forces in a system. Born in the 1970s, complexity science aims to discover deep mathematical algorithms that will help "achieve a comprehensive understanding of the higher productions of the material world." (5) Complexity theory seeks to understand such complex processes as ecosystems and patterns of human culture "in terms of complex dynamics from which emerge characteristic patterns of order." (6)
As a starting point, complexity theorists have focused primarily on biological systems. Edward O. Wilson notes:
Organisms and their assemblages are the most complex systems known. They are also self-assembling and adaptive. Living systems in general, by constructing themselves from molecule to cell to organism to ecosystem, surely display whatever laws of complexity and emergence lie within our reach. (7)
In The Origins of Order, (8) an ambitious and seminal work on complexity theory, biologist Stuart Kauffman describes how he created massive computer-aided simulations exploring a variety of possible worlds in the hopes of revealing the methods to achieve a comprehensive understanding of complex systems in today's world. Kauffman theorizes that both simple and complex systems reach ordered states spontaneously. Consequently, to understand complex systems, Kauffman argues that we must integrate scientific theories of self-organization and natural selection to "understand how selection interacts with systems which have their own spontaneously ordered properties." (9) Kauffman ultimately posits that "the evolutionary marriage of self-organization and selection is itself governed by law: selection achieves and maintains complex systems poised on the boundary, or edge, between order and chaos." (10) Within such systems, system members co-evolve successfully and "optimize their capacity to co-evolve by mutually attaining the edge of chaos." (11)
A. The need for caution in applying complexity science and chaos theory to antitrust analyses
1. THE NEED FOR GREATER EMPIRICAL INFORMATION
Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge. (12) Complexity theory needs vastly more empirical information and objective scientific testing before we can apply it to fields such as economics with a high degree of confidence or certainty. We must humbly recognize that we are a long way from comprehending the full mystery of even the simplest living systems. As observed by the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francois Jacob:
The only logic that biologists really master is one-dimensional. As soon as a second dimension is added, not to mention a third one, biologists are no longer at ease.... However, during the development of the embryo, the world is no longer merely linear. The one-dimensional sequence of bases in the genes determines in some way the production of two-dimensional tissues and organs that give the organism its shape, its properties, and ... its four-dimensional behavior. How this occurs is a mystery. (13)
If we look at our genetic information in terms of computer storage capacity, our current inability to fully understand our biological processes is put into simple perspective. We find that a single-spaced typed page contains [10.sup.4] bytes of information, while all of the currently published scientific articles contain [10.sup.12] bytes, and the sum total of human knowledge of books contains [10.sup.18] bytes. In comparison, storing the...
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