Born out of the conscious effort to imitate mechanical physics, neoclassical economics ended up in the mid 20th century embracing a purely mathematical notion of rigor as embodied by the axiomatic method. This lecture tries to explain how this could happen, or, why and when the economists’...

The goal of the paper is to investigate the extent of the influence of American antitrust tradition on the foundation and early years of European competition policy. This as part of a wider research program aiming at assessing the role of economic theory in the development of antitrust law and...

The paper presents three different reconstructions of the 1980s boom of game theory and its rise to the present status of indispensable tool-box for modern economics. The first story focuses on the Nash refinements literature and on the development of Bayesian games. The second emphasizes the...

A reaction curve RC, also called reaction function or best-reply function, is the locus of optimal, i.e. profit-maximizing, actions that a firm may undertake for any given action chosen by a rival firm. The RC diagram is the standard tool for the graphical analysis of duopoly. In the diagram the...

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...

Bayesian rationality is the paradigm of rational behavior in neoclassical economics. A rational agent in an economic model is one who maximizes her subjective expected utility and consistently revises her beliefs according to Bayes’s rule. The paper raises the question of how, when and why...

The paper deals with the mysterious persistence of the Chicago approach as the main analytical engine driving antitrust enforcement in the US. While the approach has been almost completely replaced in contemporary industrial economics by the so-called Post-Chicago view, with its superior...

Most late 19th-century US economists gave a rather cool welcome to the Sherman Act (1890) and, though less harshly, to the Clayton and FTC Acts (1914). A large literature has identified several explanations for this surprising attitude, calling into play the relation between big business and...