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...

Medienmärkte sind aufgrund ihrer kulturellen und sprachlichen Verwurzelungen (sowie umfangreicher nationaler (Schutz-) Regulierungen) Spätentwickler der europäischen Integration. Bis heute wurden und werden die meisten Medienmärkte national abgegrenzt, wie beispielsweise auch bei dem...

We review the Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office Germany) decision on the proposed merger between Springer and ProSiebenSat.1 from an economic point of view. In doing so, it is not our goal to analyse whether the controversial decision by the Bundeskartellamt has been correct or flawed from...

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...

The US Supreme Court’s overruling of the pre-existing per se illegality of resale price maintenance and the recommendation of a rule of reason approach in the Leegin decision (2007), raise the question whether other jurisdictions should follow this approach and what future assessments of...

Although both in US antitrust and European competition law there is a clear evolution to a much broader application of "rule of reason" (instead of per-se rules), there is also an increasing awareness of the problems of a case-by-case approach. The "error costs approach" (minimizing the sum of...

In many cases, collusive agreements are formed by asymmetric firms and include only a subset of the firms active in the cartelized industry. This paper endogenizes the process of cartel formation in a numeric simulation model where firms differ in marginal costs and production technologies. The...

The Condorcet Jury Theorem is derived from the implicit assumption that jury members only commit one type of error. If the probability of this error is smaller than 0.5, then group decisions are better than those of individual members. In binary decision situations, however, two types of error...

It has been argued that procedural formalism undermines economic efficiency by fostering rent-seeking and corruption. We challenge this view by arguing that a number of judicial procedures foster economic growth by increasing the predict-ability of court decisions, which leads to more...