In the game of Chicken, two drivers at opposite ends of a stretch of road face their cars toward each other and accelerate. The rules are simple: the first driver to swerve in order to avoid a head-on collision loses. Game theory teaches that a winning strategy for Chicken requires one driver to convince the other driver that she absolutely will not swerve. Perhaps the clearest way to do this is for one driver to remove her car’s steering wheel and disconnect her brakes; thus, once that driver accelerates her car, she can neither swerve nor stop. Short of such mechanical adjustments, a winning strategy for the game of Chicken is to convince the other driver that you are irrational—that you will not swerve, even if it means your death. Because swerving to avoid an oncoming car is rational, the first driver to convince her opponent that she is irrational and will not swerve is most likely to win.

Analyzing the game of Chicken can provide insights into the rationality of apparently irrational behavior. In particular, the game of Chicken can teach a useful lesson about the plausibility of antitrust claims. Antitrust law sets out the rules for competition in the American marketplace. It proscribes certain agreements among competitors and certain anticompetitive conduct by dominant firms. As legal scholars associated with the law and economics movement have achieved significant influence, the concept of business rationality has gained greater traction in antitrust case law. Federal judges are more frequently concluding that some types of anticompetitive conduct are facially irrational or implausible and, therefore, could not have occurred as a matter of law (because it is implausible that a business would act irrationally). This Article challenges the current judicial use of rationality theory and argues that in many cases judges are employing an overly narrow conception of rationality. This conception eliminates potentially valid antitrust claims by elevating theory over fact and by failing to appreciate that behavior that appears irrational can be rational in some circumstances.