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...

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...

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...

Can competition law also take into account effects on privacy or should privacy concerns of data-collecting behaviour only be dealt with by data protection law? In this paper we are analysing the German Facebook case, in which certain terms of service (that force consumers to give consent for...

This paper provides a theoretic model for the analysis of cartel formation in an industry that is subject to profit shocks. The competitive or collusive conduct of a firm is determined by a decision maker who maximizes the present value of utility that accrues to him by earning a share of the...

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...

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...

Non-controlling minority shareholdings in rivals (NCMS) lower the sus- tainability of collusion under a wide variety of circumstances. Nevertheless, NCMS are sometimes deemed to facilitate collusion, in particular if the level of NCMS is exogenous. The present paper endogenizes firms' choice of...

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...

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...