Since the introduction of a formal commitments procedure in EU antitrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Bebchuk, 1984; Shavell, 1988)...

The purpose of this working paper is to demonstrate that European competition lawyers – or at least most of them – do not need a shrink. More seriously, this paper underlines that a significant body of behavioral economics has already penetrated European Union (“EU”) competition law, in...

This paper explores the possibility of remedial intervention against the credit rating oligopoly under the competition rules. It is divided in six parts. Following an introduction, Part II provides an overview of the credit rating industry. Part III demonstrates that there is a possible economic...

This paper attempts to demonstrate that whilst parallel trade (also referred to as “grey market trade” in the United States, or as “arbitrage” in economic theory) in the European Union is subject to a remarkably favourable legal regime, the economic case supporting this approach remains...

This paper seeks to examine whether the legal standards underpinning the application of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) need to be revisited in light of the alleged specificities of “technology-enabled” markets. To this end, the paper is divided in...

This paper lays down the rudiments of a descriptive theory of competition among the digital tech platforms known as “FANGs” (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google), amidst rising academic and policy polarization over the answer to what seems to be – at least at the formulation level – a...

The IEEE-SA updated patent policy and the Business Review Letter issued by the US DoJ have caused much discussion in the US (Sidak, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to assess whether a similarly lenient antitrust approach to Standard Setting Organizations’ (“SSOs”) rate setting policies...

This paper offers a complete overview of the oligopoly problem in competition law and economics, with a specific focus on European Union (EU) law. A related purpose of the paper is to challenge the dominant view that merger control is the ultimate preventive remedy against tacit collusion. On...

The present article discusses remedies for coordinated effects under the EU Merger Regulation. To this end, it is divided in three parts. Part I reviews the remedies applied to date by the Commission in coordinated effects cases (I). Part II discusses the substantive standard against which such...

This short paper offers a first analysis of the UEFA's "break even requirement" under the EU competition rules. It shows that there are good reasons to believe that the UEFA Financial Fair Play regulation violates Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, in particular because it...