By Max Huffman
Behavioral antitrust has proved to have staying power, with continued attention as an area of scholarly inquiry now two decades after the foundational work in behavioral law and economics was published. This short article revisits the origin and meaning of behavioral antitrust and highlights a few areas of its application. The article shows that nothing has been written that directly challenges the applications. It does address critiques of behavioral antitrust, which are several, and in some cases strong, and shows how they do not engage the proponents of behavioral antitrust directly. Instead, while proponents identify areas of application, detractors rue the lack of a general theory. The paper concludes that the progress of antitrust law and economics accommodates new information whether from behavioral economics or any other source, and as that information becomes sufficiently well understood it may lead to an adjustment of standards.
