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We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990-2009 period. Our empirical results suggest that phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as – unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions – phase-1 remedies...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011392122
Cartels can severely harm social welfare. Competition authorities introduced leniency rules to destabilize existing cartels and hinder the formation of new ones. Empirically, it is difficult to judge the success of these measures because functioning cartels are unobservable. Existing...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012134469
The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012406226
In 2008, the European Commission investigated E.ON, a large and vertically integrated electricity company, for the alleged abuse of a joint dominant position by strategically withholding generation capacity. The case was settled after E.ON agreed to divest 5,000 MW generation capacity as well as...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011722703
Becker and Murphy (1988) constructed, in a well-known paper, a model of rational addiction in which people solve a dynamic optimization problem, choose an optimal timepath of drug consumption and thereby maximize lifetime utility. The model leads to the hypothesis that future consumption is a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011436465
We investigate the impact of competition policy enforcement on the functioning of European energy markets, and how sectoral regulation influences these outcomes. For this purpose, we compile a new dataset on the European Commission’s (EC) and EU member states’ competition policy decisions,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011672928
This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in the digital sector. We first discuss the most crucial features of digital markets such as network effects, multi-sidedness, big data, and rapid innovation that create important challenges for competition...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012137099
I study the predictability of the EC’s merger decision procedure before and after the 2004 merger policy reform based on a dataset covering all affected markets of mergers with an official decision documented by DG Comp between 1990 and 2014. Using the highly flexible, non-parametric random...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011995257
many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012426540
This paper analyzes a merger of large manufacturers with divestiture in the French coffee market. In contrast to previous approaches used to study the effects of upstream divestitures on prices and welfare, we model the vertical market structure. First, our results show that the standard policy...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014561412