Antitrust and Trade Regulation Commons^™

Understanding Behavioral Antitrust, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

Behavioral antitrust – the application to antitrust analysis of empirical evidence of robust behavioral deviations from strict rationality – is increasingly popular and hotly debated by legal scholars and the enforcement agencies alike. This Article shows, however, that both proponents and opponents of behavioral antitrust frequently and fundamentally misconstrue its methodology, treating concrete empirical phenomena as if they were broad hypothetical assumptions. Because of this fundamental methodological error, scholars often make three classes of mistakes in behavioral antitrust analyses: First, they fail to appreciate the variability and heterogeneity of behavioral phenomena; second, they disregard the concrete ways in which markets, …