Maverick: Making sense of a conjecture of antitrust policy in the lab

Engel, Christoph; Ockenfels, Axel

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Paper

Maverick: Making sense of a conjecture of antitrust policy in the lab

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons183106

Engel, Christoph
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons183179

Ockenfels, Axel
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2013_14online.pdf
(Preprint)

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Engel, C., & Ockenfels, A. (2013). Maverick: Making sense of a conjecture of antitrust policy in the lab.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0028-6DD2-C

Abstract

Antitrust authorities all over the world are concerned if a particularly aggressive competitor, a "maverick", is bought out of the market. Yet there is a lack of theoretical justification. One plausible determinant of acting as a maverick is behavioral: the maverick derives utility from acting competitively. We test this conjecture in the lab. In a pretest, we classify participants by their social value orientation. Individuals who are rivalistic in an allocation task indeed bid more aggressively in a laboratory oligopoly market. This disciplines incumbents. In our setting, this does not create sufficient incentives for buying out mavericks, though.