This special issue marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of a leniency program for antitrust in the EU and contains five original papers: Each paper examines the effects of design parameters of leniency programs on their performance. Before introducing each contribution separately, we...

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for...

We examine recent claims that a particular Q-learning algorithm used by competitors 'autonomously' and systematically learns to collude, resulting in supracompetitive prices and extra profits for the firms sustained by collusive equilibria. A detailed analysis of the inner workings of this...

Two family-specific lotteries take place during conception— a social lottery that determines who our parents are and which environment we grow up in, and a genetic lottery that determines which part of their genomes our parents pass on to us. The outcomes of these lotteries create inequalities...

We study antitrust enforcement in which the fine must obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. We integrate these legal principles into an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model. Bankruptcy considerations ensure...

We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...

In Katsoulacos et al. (2015) we examined the welfare properties of a number of monetary penalty regimes for tackling cartels, including revenue-based penalties, the most widely used regime. We showed that for a typical industry overcharge–based penalties welfare-dominate the others. However...

This paper develops a model of the birth and death of cartels in the presence of enforcement activities by a Competition Authority (CA). We distinguish three sets of interventions: (a) detecting, prosecuting and penalizing cartels; (b) actions that aim to stop cartel activity in the short-term,...

We study antitrust enforcement in which the fine must obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. We integrate these legal principles into an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model. Bankruptcy considerations ensure...

We apply theories of capital market failure to ana1yzeoptima1 financing of risky higher education. In the market solution,students can only finance their education through debt. There isunderinvestment in human capita1, because some students with socia1lyprofitable investments in human capita1...