There's a new methodology to detect monopoly conditions: Olley-Paks.

Here's Claude's synthesis after we had a discussion about the article.

"Concentration and markups measure market structure, not market process.

Both can rise in healthy markets (productive firms growing, innovation being rewarded) or sick ones (incumbents protected from competition).

They're outcomes that don't tell you if the competitive discovery mechanism is actually working.

The Olley-Pakes decomposition instead measures whether resources are flowing to more productive firms—essentially asking: "Is the market rewarding excellence?"

It decomposes aggregate productivity into

If that covariance is positive and rising, competition is functioning.

If it's zero or falling, something is blocking the reallocation process regardless of what concentration looks like.

The policy implication: Instead of asking "how many firms?" or "how much profit?", ask "are better firms growing faster than worse ones?"

This reframes antitrust from policing structure to diagnosing whether the discovery process is functioning—much closer to what competition actually does in a market economy."