This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

We investigate the possibility for two vertically related firms to at least partially collude on the wholesale price over an infinite horizon to mitigate or eliminate the effects of double marginalisation, thereby avoiding contracts which might not be enforceable. We characterise alternative...

The paper's starting point is that EC competition law does not draw any distinction between horizontal and vertical relations when it comes to the definition of the concept of agreement. This approach could make sense if vertical and horizontal agreements were considered as equally harmful to...

This paper analyses how the endogenous detection of an upstream cartel by a down-stream buyer allows the detecting firm to raise rivals' cost. We model a market with a vertical structure, where a stable all-inclusive cartel is operating in the upstream market which provides an input to a...

We investigate the possibility for two vertically related firms to at least partially collude on the wholesale price over an in.nite horizon to mitigate or eliminate the e¤ects of double marginalisation, thereby avoiding contracts which might not be enforceable. We characterise alternative...

We investigate the effect of a vertical merger on downstream firms' ability to collude in a repeated game framework. We show that a vertical merger has two main effects. On the one hand, it increases the total collusive profits, increasing the stakes of collusion. On the other hand, it creates...

We consider a vertically related industry and analyze how the total harm due to a price increase upstream is distributed over downstream firms and final consumers. For this purpose, we develop a general model without making specific assumptions regarding demand, costs, or the mode of...

Legal actions by direct and indirect purchasers to recover damages as a result of price-fixing by suppliers have been common in the United States for many years and are now beginning in a number of other countries including Australia and Canada. This paper argues that traditional measures of...

This report explains the principal economic and legal features of a unique set of data on 283 modern private international cartels discovered anywhere in the world from January 1990 to the end of 2005. Measured in real 2005 money, aggregate cartel sales and overcharges totaled about $1.2...