Papers presented by JoAnne Yates since 2019
2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"Political and Legal Responses to Cooperative Standard Setting"
JoAnne Yates, MIT Sloan School of Management
Craig Murphy, Wellesley College
Abstract:
The network of voluntary standardization organizations that emerged in the 20th century was based on cooperation between companies, industries, and nations. As we have shown (Yates and Murphy 2019), this cooperation promoted efficiency and the growth of markets. This paper explores political and legal responses to such cooperative standardization. Governments have avoided setting standards even when they have a constitutional mandate to do so. For example, in governments as different as those of the United States and France in the 18th and 19th centuries, governments delayed setting even the most fundamental standards of measurement. In industrial standardization, governments often lacked either the expertise or the will to set standards. Consequently, they encouraged the private, voluntary standard setting organizations that emerged in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and referenced such standards in legislation on a national, regional, and international level. We will discuss this response to cooperative standard setting, and its results and implications. Another response to the cooperation inherent in voluntary standard setting, especially in the US, is to view standard setting as potentially collusive, and thus a target of anti-trust law. Voluntary standard setting within the American National Standards Institution (ANSI) has generally been viewed as increasing, not decreasing, competition, and thus has not been the subject of much anti-trust legal action. The major anti-trust case around such standards in the 20th century, American Society of Mechanical Engineers v. Hydrolevel Corp., 456 U.S. 556 (1986), was rare in that it went beyond asserting that standard setters needed to follow their own principles of balancing the interests of producer and purchaser companies and the general interest. It was a very narrow decision, but had a wide impact on the organizational form of ANSI, as well as on professional engineering societies.