Two import factors contributed to antitrust policy’s domestic decline. The first is salience, especially the salience of the U.S. antitrust goals. In the past thirty years, enforcers and courts abandoned antitrust’s political, social, and moral goals, in their quest for a single economic goal. Second antitrust policy increasingly relied on an incomplete, distorted conception of competition. Adopting the Chicago School’s simplifying assumptions of self-correcting markets composed of rational, self-interested market participants, the courts and enforcers sacrificed important political, social, and moral values to promote certain economic beliefs.

With the anger over taxpayer bailouts for firms deemed too-big-and-integral-to-fail, the wealth inequality that accelerated over the past thirty years, and the current budget cuts and austerity measures, the United States is ripe for a new antitrust policy cycle.

This Article first summarizes the quest during the past 30 years for a single economic goal. It discusses why this quest failed. Four oft-cited economic goals (ensuring an effective competitive process, promoting consumer welfare, maximizing efficiency, and ensuring economic freedom) never unified antitrust analysis. After discussing why it is unrealistic to believe that a single well-defined antitrust objective exists, the Article proposes how to account antitrust’s multiple policy objectives into the legal framework. It outlines a blended goal approach, and the benefits of this approach in providing better legal standards and reviving antitrust’s relevance.

This Article reexamines one premise of competition, namely the extent to which firms, consumers, and the government are rational and act with perfect willpower. In varying this assumption, this Article maps four scenarios of competition.

Competition authorities should revisit their conception of competition, including the underlying assumptions, to better understand the competitive dynamics in different industries. In engaging in this review, competition authorities should consider the developments in several inter-disciplinary fields, such as behavioral economics, new institutional economics, and evolutionary economics. The literature can provide competition authorities a richer understanding of observed behavior in the marketplace, how consumers choose, and additional remedial options, such as default options. Ultimately, these interdisciplinary economic theories can improve antitrust analysis by helping us understand first what competition is, second what competition can achieve for us, and finally how competition can promote the good life.

This article explores how the behavioral economics literature will advance competition policy. With increasing interest in the United States and abroad in the implications of behavioral economics for competition policy, this Article first provides an overview of behavioral economics. It next discusses how the assumption of rational, self-interested profit-maximizers became so embedded in competition policy. The Article then discusses to what extent the behavioral economics literature can inform antitrust policies, and provides several recommendations related to the practical application of behavioral economics to competition policy going forward.

Although the U.S. antitrust laws seek to deter acts of unfair competition, which historically included a competitor’s deception, some federal courts, recently have erected hurdles for antitrust plaintiffs injured by a monopolist’s deception. Such hurdles are contrary to the Sherman Act's legislative aim, the common law antecedents of the Sherman Act, and other congressional policies. Moreover, the courts’ legal standards for evaluating a monopolist’s deception involving advertising and product disparagement, vaporware, standard-setting organizations, and other deceptive conduct differ.

This Article proposes a “quick-look” legal standard for evaluating a monopolist’s alleged deception. It addresses how the standard promotes several rule-of-law principles and responds to concerns about using the antitrust laws to combat deception.

This article addresses one cornerstone of neoclassical economic theory, namely that rational consumers pursue their economic self-interests. It is commonly associated with Adam Smith’s famous statement: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” This assumption of self-interest has had profound policy implications as it pervades many areas of the law.

The article first outlines how this assumption of self-interest has shaped U.S. competition policy over the past thirty years. It next surveys the behavioral experiments, which show that many individuals do not solely pursue their self-interest. Indeed, appealing to self-interest, as several of these experiments demonstrate, may lead to suboptimal outcomes. The assumption also disregards the important effect of social, ethical, and moral norms on human behavior. Because the assumption of self-interest is not descriptive, the article next addresses whether governmental policies should advocate the pursuit of self-interest. Using the recent findings from the happiness economic literature, the article shows why appealing to self-interest may make citizens more, not less, miserable. It then discusses the risks if governmental policies prime individuals to pursue their self-interest. The article has broad implications for U.S. economic and legal policies, as the assumption of self-interest implicates, among other things, environmental concerns, consumerism, the problems Americans face in a debt economy, and privacy concerns.