To stimulate companies to take corporate social responsibility collectively, for example for climate change or fair trade, their agreements may be exempted from cartel law. To qualify under Article 101(3) TFEU, the public benefits must compensate consumers for higher prices of the private good....

Cartels may be exempted from competition law if they sufficiently promote sustainability objectives. To qualify, the collusive agreement should not fully eliminate competition. We study how remaining and fringe competition affect incentives to produce more sustainably under semi-collusion in an...

Several competition authorities consider the exemption of horizontal agreements among firms from antitrust liability if the agreements sufficiently promote public interest objectives such as sustainable consumption and production. We show that when consumers value sustainable products and firms...

Health systems that use market competition to increase efficiency rely on competition agencies to protect competition. The institutional expectation is that competition agencies protect the effective functioning of market-based health systems by carrying out the surveillance duties bestowed upon...

Schinkel and Spiegel (2017) finds that allowing sustainability agreements in which firms coordinate their investments in sustainability leads to lower investments and lower output. By contrast, allowing production agreements, in which firms coordinate output yet continue to compete on...

Against the background of growing discontent over excessive leniency of US and EU competition policy, this article argues that the policy displays characteristics corresponding to those that brought about the social capture of financial policy co-responsible for the late 2000s global crisis. The...

The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets and the EU Commission have published proposals to green antitrust. Based on the assumption that Article 101(3) TFEU allows collective action, both competition agencies suggest different routes to re-interpret the consumer benefit and indispensability...

Lacking predictability of competition-law enforcement has its costs. This paper shows that academic analyses of what competition laws should look like do not always treat this factor adequately, paying instead excessive attention to the problem of error. Namely, some analyses completely ignore...

Industry-wide voluntary agreements are touted as a means for corporations to take more corporate social responsibility (CSR). We study what type of joint CSR agreement induces competitors to increase CSR efforts in a model of oligopolistic competition with differentiated products. Consumers have...

Over the past ten years several EU Member States decided to integrate their competition authorities with their consumer protection agencies. In 2010, the Danish Competition Authority and the Danish Consumer Agency merged into the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority. In 2013 the Finnish...