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 demonstrates...

The process of globalization causes an increasing intensity of institutional competition, i.e. competition among national suppliers of institutional arrangements for mobile factors. This often leads to the conclusion that the competence of national economic policy actors is decreasing. As a...

The question of a double dividend from revenue-neutral ecological tax reforms (an ecological advantage plus an economic advantage) has recently become a widely discussed topic both in real-world economic policy and in economic theory. The subject has produced many advocates and opponents in the...

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...

Despite still being younger than a decade, the theory of multisided market has offered numerous valuable insights for the analysis of non-ordinary industries in which a supplier serves two distinct customer groups that are indirectly interrelated by externalities. Examples include payment...

Standard welfare analysis of horizontal mergers usually refers to two effects: the anticompetitive market power effect reduces welfare by enabling firms to charge prices above marginal costs, whereas the procompetitive efficiency effect increases welfare by reducing the costs of production...

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...

In times of globalization, trade liberalization and deregulation of specific industries, competition authorities face new challenges in order to protect national as well as international competition. With companies operating in various countries, fading market frontiers and increasing...