What Antitrust Analysis Taught Me About Competitive Advantage
Market power is not just about what a dominant firm does today. It is about what it stops others from trying.
For an economics project at UBC, I spent several weeks analysing market dominance and antitrust regulation. The question at the centre of that work was deceptively simple: when does a company's market position stop being good competition and start being something that needs external oversight?
The standard answer focuses on price. A monopoly, in the basic model, harms consumers by charging above competitive rates. But the more I dug into real cases, the more I found that the price framing misses a lot. Some of the most consequential market power effects are not visible in what a dominant firm charges today. They show up in what potential competitors decide not to attempt.
A firm with enough control over distribution, or switching costs, or network effects, can make the economics of entry so unattractive that viable competitors do not materialise at all. The consumer harm is not a higher price on the shelf. It is a product that never got built, a market that never got contested.
I found this framing useful far outside antitrust analysis. It reframes competitive advantage not just as what you do well, but as what you make it harder for others to do at all. Switching costs, proprietary data, and deep customer relationships are not just features. They are structural moats that reshape the decisions of anyone considering entering your space.
It also changes how you think about competitive threats. If you are only watching what existing competitors are doing, you are watching the wrong thing. The more important question is what barriers exist to someone new deciding to compete with you seriously. When those barriers weaken, because a new technology lowers switching costs, because a platform changes its terms, because a regulation reshapes access, the competitive landscape shifts before any competitor appears.
For a recent graduate still learning how markets actually work, the antitrust lens was more useful than I expected. It forced a level of precision about competitive dynamics that most business strategy frameworks gesture at but rarely require you to think through carefully. The question is not just "why are we winning." It is "what would have to change for that to stop being true."