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Article
The Coming Extinction of Homo Economicus and the Eclipse of the Chicago School of Antitrust: Applying Evolutionary Biology to Structural and Behavioral Antitrust Analyses
Loyola University Chicago Law Journal (2011)
  • Thomas J. Horton, University of South Dakota School of Law
Abstract
This article argues that the models and lessons from evolutionary biology and ethics can provide fresh and useful insights to our thinking about structural and behavioral economic competition and antitrust policy. In researching this study, a diverse array of interdisciplinary legal, historical, economic, ethical, and scientific literature was reviewed. The author concludes that from an evolutionary biology perspective, diversity, variation and multiplicity are crucial to maintain a stable and efficient competitive economic system. Dominant firms and monopolies, on the other hand, are overrated in terms of their overall efficiency and positive impacts on our economic system, while their dangerous negative propensities are vastly underrated. From an evolutionary ethics perspective, the evolution of morality, ethics, fairness, and reciprocity have been crucial to our ability to build and maintain a complex competitive free-enterprise economy. We should therefore look increasingly to the evolutionary moral values of fairness and reciprocity in analyzing and punishing predatory and exclusionary acts by dominant firms and monopolists, and stop unsuccessfully trying to rely upon inflexible quantitative models to justify dangerous predatory economic behavior.
Keywords
  • Antitrust,
  • Evolutionary biology,
  • Ethics,
  • Evolutionary ethics,
  • Structural and behavioral antitrust analyses
Publication Date
Spring 2011
Citation Information
The Coming Extinction of Homo Economicus and the Eclipse of the Chicago School of Antitrust: Applying Evolutionary Biology to Structural and Behavioral Analyses, 42 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 469 (2011).