An environmental agreement in an oligopolistic market may violate the competition rules, as described in Articles 81 and 82 of the Treaty. Ordinarily, some collusion among firms is necessary for an environmental agreement to be successful. This collusion may be acceptable when it relates to the...

The aim of this paper is to describe in detail a set of newly developed indicators of the quality of competition policy, Competition Policy Indexes, or CPIs. The CPIs measure the deterrence properties of a competition policy in a jurisdiction, where for competition policy we mean the antitrust...

An antitrust authority deters collusion using fines and a leniency program. Unlike in most of the earlier literature, our firms have imperfect cumulative evidence of the collusion. That is, cartel conviction is not automatic if one firm reports: reporting makes conviction only more likely, the...

We examine the effects of Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus, influencing firms' whistle blowing incentives in one market, on their self-reporting decision in another market. Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus are proactive US strategies which aim at triggering multiple confessions by increasing the...

This paper investigates the design of a leniency policy to fight corporate crime. We explicitly take into account the agency problem within the firm. We model this through a three-tier hierarchy: authority, shareholder, and manager. The manager may breach the law and report evidence to the...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the new Council Regulation (EC) 1/2003 which replaces the mandatory notification and authorization system by a legal exception system. Effectiveness is operationalized via the two subcriteria compliance to Art. 81 EC Treaty and the probabilities of...

This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the deterrence properties of a competition policy regime. On the basis of the economic theory of law enforcement we identify several factors that are likely to affect its degree of deterrence: 1) sanctions and damages; 2) financial and human...

We present results from a laboratory experiment identifying the main channels through which different law enforcement strategies deter organized economic crime. The absolute level of a fine has a strong deterrence effect, even when the exogenous probability of apprehension is zero. This effect...