This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition … policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each … central features of antitrust policy. Our objective is to foster the improvement of legal regimes and also to identify topics …

formation, and discusses how corporate governance and firm agency problems affect optimal law enforcement against cartels, both … in terms of sanctions and leniency policies. Many of the conclusions appear applicable, with minor changes, to non-antitrust … forms of collusion, such as collusion between auditors and management, and more generally to corporate and organized crime. …

An antitrust authority deters collusion using fines and a leniency program. Unlike in most of the earlier literature …, our firms have imperfect cumulative evidence of the collusion. That is, cartel conviction is not automatic if one firm …

We study cartel contracts using data on 18 contract clauses of 109 legal Finnish manufacturing cartels. One third of … organization, or external threats. Cartels use three main approaches to raise profits: Price, market allocation, and specialization …. These appear to be substitutes. Choosing one has implications on how cartels deal with instability. Simplifying, we find …

show that any vertical merger facilitates upstream collusion, no matter how large (in terms of capacity or size of product … collusion than a similar merger with a smaller buyer. This formalizes the idea expressed in the U.S. and EU non …