[opo]

>...The "predatory" part was towards his competition. In areas where they operated he dumped product below cost.

Actually from reading your link, I don't get that impression that Standard Oil dumped product below cost to put competitors out of business. As your link states:

>...The testimonies studied by McGee and summarized in this research show that the Standard Oil did not acquire or out-compete its rivals by using predatory pricing. There is no clearcut case suggesting the opposite. In fact, Standard Oil was able to beat its competition by charging lower prices to the general public because its own average cost was significantly lower than the rest.

>...While there still remain a number of other allegations to which the Supreme Court found Standard Oil guilty, that remains beyond the scope of this research. What it can be concluded thus far is that the Supreme Court should not have found Standard Oil guilty of using predatory pricing.

The link makes a lot of references to the John McGee paper on this subject. I think that paper can be found here:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/oil/NEW_SCHOOL_COURSE200...

[jdsully]

I don't fully agree with the linked thesis, but it was a convenient link to show the average picture and his affect on consumers. Rockefeller absolutely participated in predatory pricing within local markets. Of course if you only look at national average data you won't see this.

Rockefeller would likely have still won even in a fair fight just because of his economy of scale. But that wasn't enough for him, and he resorted to underhanded tactics like having his own subsidiaries engage in fake price wars between each other. The full ownership of those subsidiaries was intentionally obscured. In this day national average data may be sufficient to build a picture, but at that time national companies were very rare and competition was heavily regional. Note that this was only a net negative for his competitors, consumers benefited from the low prices and the predicted gouging never came after.

There is a common line of thought that because consumers weren't immediately harmed that Rockefeller should never have been tried. I don't agree with that logic - the end does not justify the means.