This article provides a model of two risk-neutral firms that may cooperate to achieve a goal that is potentially illegal. The model assumes enforcement risk and firms that are imperfectly informed about antitrust law enforcement. It is shown that compliance training, which educates the agents...

Firms’ search for external knowledge is one aspect of knowledge integration in the innovation process. The literature has investigated innovation and the breadth of search in different information channels. We introduce the concept of search balance reflecting the heterogeneity of a firm’s...

The relevant competitors in regard to innovation might, but not necessarily do, correspond to the identified competitors on actual product markets. Hence, the conventional analysis of product markets, in order to assess the potential anticompetitive effects of mergers, is insufficient to capture...

The model proposed in this paper explains three stylized facts derived from case evidence: Cartel formation is more likely (i) when the industry has been hit by a negative profitability shock under the condition that (ii) this shock is rather persistent. (iii) This pattern is independent from...

The firms that compete with one another in terms of innovation do not necessarily coincide with the relevant competitors on pre-innovation product markets. As a consequence, the findings about the ambiguous interrelation between (product) market concentration and innovation cannot be transferred...

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....

In this empirical study all mergers that have been challenged by the U.S. antitrust agencies FTC and DOJ between 1995 and 2008 were analyzed in regard to the question to what extent and how the agencies assessed the innovation effects of mergers. Theoretical background is the still open question...

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...

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...