Competition agencies have the power to close an antitrust case in return for the commitment to end the alleged infringement. We examine how such a procedure affects deterrence and consumer welfare. We first show that it lowers the deterrent effect of competition policy. However, under asymmetric...

We analyze the impact of the introduction of a commitments procedure in terms of efficiency and deterrence in antitrust contexts. This procedure consists in offering an immunity of fine to a firm in return for commitments that meet the competition concerns expressed to her. We first show that...

In Europe, competition authorities have the power to close antitrust cases with “commitment decisions” after the concerned firms have offered agreed remedies. We show that the optimal use of this instrument is governed by a tradeoff between deterrence of potentially anticompetitive practices...

We examine the antitrust enforcement policies of the European Commission and of the French Competition Council. Negotiated procedures ? i.e. leniency programmes, commitments and ?no-contest? procedures ? may improve the efficiency of the intervention of an authority when deterrence has not come...

In a model a la Baron and Myerson (1982), we revisit the question of regulating a firm under asymmetric information concerning the production cost when the principal has access to a costly monitoring procedure. Our analysis gives quite different results from the existing literature. We show that...

Cet article s'attache a determiner la politique optimale de lutte contre les ententes en prix lorsque les autorites concurrentielles observent imparfaitement le cout des firmes.

In this paper, I completely characterize the optimal policy against price-fixings when the agency in charge of competition policy lacks information about the production cost of an industry. I consider two types of punishment. The first one consists in imposing a fine proportional to the total...

Le processus d'accession de l'Algérie à l'OMC, qui a débuté en 1987 dans le cadre du GATT, est de loin le plus long parmi les négociations en cours. Malgré ce délai, un certain nombre de problèmes importants doivent encore être réglés pour aboutir à un accord. Le passage du GATT à...

We study horizontal partial acquisitions in an oligopolistic industry in the absence of synergies. Contrary to existing results, we find that a dominant shareholder may choose to acquire shares in a competitor although the aggregate profit of the group of firms under his control, and even the...

This paper studies horizontal mergers in vertically related markets. In atwo-level Cournot model, with an intermediate and a final market, we show thatdownstream mergers inducing size effects are, ceteris paribus, more profitablethan upstream ones. Moreover, a merger at one level reduces the...