Unfair Competition and Corporate Income Taxation

Abstract

I will demonstrate that previous analysts have dismissed the issue of "unfair" competition too quickly. While I agree that nofiprofits are no more likely to engage in predatory pricing than for-profits, I will show that for-profit investors may be injured even when predation does not occur. Forprofit investors' claims of injury are neither obviously correct nor patently false. Their validity depends both on one's definition of fairness and on a set of factual issues including the market structure of the industry in question, the information available to firms before they enter, the costs of leaving the industry, and the efficiency of capital markets. Both the firms that complain of injury and the legal scholars who minimize the problem of unfair competition have oversimplified the issue and missed critically important features of the problem.