This chapter provides an overview of the interplay between social comparison and competition before, during, and after the competition. We define competition broadly to include an act or process of competition, explicit or implicit, and link it to basic social comparison processes. Before the...

The accepted economic foundation of antitrust law is straightforward: The neoclassical market model shows that perfect competition among firms maximizes productive and allocative efficiencies and social welfare. This model rests on several assumptions, including — as in neoclassical economics...

The central economic justification for competition law is that the protection of competition promotes welfare. In particular, perfect competition among firms catering to consumer demand for goods and services maximizes social welfare by generating both allocative and productive efficiencies....

This chapter examines entrepreneurial activity and its implication for policy and antitrust law from a behavioral perspective. In particular, the analysis here focuses on the role of two sets of behavioral phenomena — overconfident beliefs and risk- seeking preferences — in facilitating...

Unlike traditional antitrust analysis, a behavioural approach to antitrust law and economics is grounded in empirical observations of human behaviour. These reveal that judgments and decisions by real decision-makers in the market deviate systematically from those predicted by the rational...

This chapter examines some of the important tasks awaiting the next generation of scholarship in behavioural law and economics. Some of these tasks reflect the need for expanding the breadth of the behavioural approach to law while others involve the mission of increasing its depth. The...

Nudges are increasingly popular, in large part due to the typically low costs required to implement them. Yet most often the main cost of nudging is not its implementation cost but rather the opportunity costs of its successful change of the behavior of its targets. Accounting for these target...

The increasing popularity of behavioral interventions—also known as nudges—is largely due to their perceived potential to promote public and private welfare at dramatically lower costs than those of traditional regulatory instruments, such as mandates or taxes. Yet, though nudges typically...

Governments and organizations increasingly use behavioral regulation (“nudging”) to substitute for and complement traditional instruments, often treating it as “a free lunch.” However, a closer analysis of nudges reveals that they can generate substantial private costs rather than...