The US Supreme Court's overruling of the pre-existing per se illegality of resale price maintenance and the recommendation of a rule of reason approach in the Leegin decision (2007), raise the question whether other jurisdictions should follow this approach and what future assessments of resale...

For a general class of oligopoly models with price competition, we analyze the impact of ex-ante leniency programs in antitrust regulation on the endogenous maximal-sustainable cartel price. This impact depends upon industry characteristics including its cartel culture. Our analysis disentangles...

This paper argues that empirical economic analysis in court proceedings is subject to important economic and legal restrictions, cumulating in a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and practicality. We draw lessons from two influential German court cases - the paper wholesaler cartel decision...

I find that current US's and EU's Antitrust laws -- in particular their "moderate"' leniency programmes that only reduce or at best cancel sanctions for price-fixing firms that self-report -- may make collusion enforceable even in one-shot competitive interactions, like Bertrand oligopolies and...

Previous research exploring the effect of corporate leniency programs has modelled the oligopoly stage game as a Prisoners?Dilemma. Using numerical analysis, we consider the Bertrand price game and allow the probability of detection and penalties to be sensitive to firms?prices. Consistent with...

The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...

In its landmark ruling in Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court restricted standing to sue for recovery of antitrust damages to direct purchasers. However, antitrust damages are typically (in part) passed on to intermediaries lower in the chain of production and...

We formulate a simple model of optimal defensive disclosure by a monopolist facinguncertain antitrust enforcement and test its implications using unique data on defensivedisclosures and patents by IBM during 1955-1989. Our results indicate that strongerantitrust enforcement leads to more...

We estimate the deterrence effects of U.S. merger policy instruments with respect tothe composition and frequency of future merger notifications. Data from the Annual Reports bythe U.S. DOJ and FTC allow industry based measures over the 1986-1999 period of theconditional probabilities for...

The globalisation of the world economy on the one side and the expansion of national systems of competition antitrust law on the other side over the last few years have raised to the top of the international agenda the trade and competition issue. While trade barriers are decreasing and business...