United Rentals Highway Technologies, Inc. v. Indiana Constructors, Inc.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

Adam Smith believed that the key to economic progress is specialization. The production process is subdivided into narrow tasks, and workers gain speed and accuracy from performing just one of them. As markets expand, the opportunities for specialization expand too, because having a substantial market for its output the specialized producer (and its specialized subdivisions) can grow large enough to reap economies of scale and thus minimize its costs. We can see the process at work in the highway construction industry. The creation of the interstate highway system in the…