Abstract: This article addresses two issues relating to the choice between a consumer welfare and
total welfare standard for competition law. First, it considers whether distributive considerations
may favor a consumer welfare standard, or at least some underweighting of producer surplus in a
total welfare assessment. The argument that focusing on consumer welfare is poorly targeted to
general redistributive objectives is correct but not decisive since the distributive incidences of
consumer and producer surplus differ significantly. By contrast, the argument that it is more
efficient to rely exclusively on the tax and transfer system to achieve general distributive
objectives is normatively powerful. Second, the relevance of the preexisting level of price
elevation (relative to a competitive, marginal cost benchmark) is found to be quite different
under the two standards. For a given additional price increase caused by anticompetitive
activity, the marginal sacrifice of consumer welfare is greatest when there is no preexisting
elevation and gradually falls as the initial elevation grows. By contrast, the marginal sacrifice of
total welfare (deadweight loss) is negligible when there is no preexisting elevation and rises as
the initial elevation grows. This difference has implications for competition policy, most
directly for that toward horizontal mergers and price-fixing, along with practices that facilitate
coordinated price elevation.