Games judges don't play: predatory pricing and strategic reasoning in US antitrust

Nicola Giocoli

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The paper analyzes the last three decades of debates on predatory pricing in US antitrust law, starting from the literature which followed Areeda & Turner 1975 and ending with the early years of the new century, after the Brooke decision. Special emphasis is given to the game-theoretic approach to predation and to the reasons why this approach has never gained attention in courtrooms. It is argued that, despite their mathematical rigor, the sophisticated stories told by strategic models in order to demonstrate the actual viability of predatory behavior fail to satisfy the criteria which guide the decisions of antitrust courts, in particular their preference for easy-to-apply rules. Therefore predation cases are still governed by a peculiar alliance between Chicago-style price theory – which, contrary to game theory, considers predatory behavior almost always irrational – and a Harvard-style attention for the operational side of antitrust enforcement.

Keywords: Antitrust law; predatory pricing; Chicago School; Harvard; game theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B21 K21 L41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/33810/2/MPRA_paper_33810.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Games judges don't play: predatory pricing and strategic reasoning in US antitrust (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:33810

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().