Advances in competition economics as well as in computational and empirical methods have offered the scope for the employment of merger simulation models in merger control procedures during the past almost 15 years. Merger simulation is, nevertheless, still a very young and innovative instrument...

Advanced economic instruments like simulation models are enjoying an increased popularity in practical antitrust. There is hope that they – being quantitative predictive economic evidence – can substitute for qualitative structural analysis and lead to unambiguous results. This paper...

In competition law, the problem of the optimal design of institutional and procedural rules concerns assessment processes of the pro- and anticompetitiveness of business behaviors. This is well recognized in the discussion about the relative merits of different assessment principles such as the...

We demonstrate that the popular Farrell-Shapiro-framework (FSF) for the analysis of mergers in oligopolies relies regarding its policy conclusions sensitively on the assumption that rational agents will only propose privately profitable mergers. If this assumption held, a positive external...

An increasingly important part of contemporary merger control both in the US and the EU is unilateral effects analysis, particularly with regard to oligopolistic mergers. In practice, this requires econometric analyses of past market data and, above all, the construction of simulation models in...

The recent Impala Judgment by the CFI on the Sony/BMG Decision by the Commission represents the most important ruling on collective dominance since Airtours. We review both the Decision and the Judgment and derive implications for the institutional and substantive development of EU Merger...

Regression methods are commonly used in competition lawsuits for, e.g., determining overcharges in pricefixing cases. Technical evaluations of these methods' pros and cons are not necessarily intuitive. Appraisals that are based on case studies are descriptive but need not be universally valid....

This study analyses public attitudes towards the degree of government involvement in ensuring the livelihood and care of the elderly in Japan. Using four waves of individual-level annual data from the Japanese General Social Survey collected over the period 2000-2005, we estimate ordered logit...

This paper studies attitudes about who should provide for the livelihood of the elderly in two aging societies, namely Germany and Japan. Applying an ordered logit model to individual data from representative public opinion surveys, it is analysed which socio-demographic, economic or political...