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BY-NC-ND 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter 2020

16. Maverick: Experimentally Testing a Conjecture of the Antitrust Authorities

From the book Advances in the Sociology of Trust and Cooperation

Christoph Engel and Axel Ockenfels

Abstract

Antitrust authorities all over the world are keen on the presence of a particularly aggressive competitor, a “maverick”. 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. We conclude that the existence of rivalistic attitudes may justify antitrust policies that protect mavericks.

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
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