PAUL MacAVOY AND THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS

Paul MacAvoy's work focused on economic analysis of regulation, antitrust, and other forms of government intervention that constrain the management and strategies of the American corporation. As a scholar and business school dean, he repeatedly faced the questions of how American industry could be persuaded to fund such research and how, if such funding were forthcoming, its recipients would maintain academic standards of rigor and objectivity. I recount here two episodes from different points in Paul's career that reveal his thinking and action concerning these questions. The first was his founding of the Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science in 1970. The second was Paul's role as the outside academic adviser to the American Enterprise Institute's telecommunications deregulation project, beginning in 1992.