Behavioral Economics: Implications for Antitrust Practitioners

Elizabeth Bailey

3/18/2015
(Original Publish Date: 6/1/2010)

For antitrust practitioners, there are two familiar behavioral assumptions used in the economic models that underlie antitrust analyses: firms maximize their profits and consumers maximize their utility. Understanding how consumers and firms depart from the assumptions that underlie standard economic models is the focus of a field of economics research called "behavioral economics." For an antitrust practitioner, understanding how well actual decision-making behavior lines up with that assumed in standard economic models makes good sense because antitrust analyses rely on economic models.