The ministerial proposal for a 10th amendment of the German competition law particularly addresses abuse control and seeks to tighten this pillar of competition policy against the background of the challenges from the digital economy. Next to extending the classic policy instruments of abuse...

This paper explores the relation between the regulation of monopolistic upstream prices and the incentives of a vertically integrated input monopolist to discriminate third parties on the downstream market. Currently, this is an issue in network industries like telecommunications, electricity...

Due to potential abuse of the market power at wholesale and retail market level for natural gas the Federal Cartel Office in Germany prohibited further forward integration of gas importing firms with retail incumbents from 2005/2006 to 2010. The Authority argued that the very few dominant gas...

This paper explores the relation between the regulation of monopolistic upstream prices and the incentives of a vertically integrated input monopolist to discriminate third parties on the downstream market. Currently, this is an issue in network industries like telecommunications, electricity...

Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) increasingly gain in importance with respect to the supply of pharmaceutical products and frequently use multiple or exclusive rebate contracts to exercise market power. Based on a Hotelling model of horizontal and vertical product differentiation, we...

On 9 June 2017, the 9th Amendment to the German Competition Act (Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen) entered into force. It transposes the EU Directive on Antitrust Damages Actions into German law. Yet, the German legislator also took the opportunity to implement some additional changes....

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...

Der Beitrag analysiert die Angebotsseite des Pflegezusatzversicherungsmarktes, indem er die Bepreisung sowie den Umfang von geförderten und ungeförderten Pflegetagegeldversicherungen vergleicht. Grundlage ist dabei ein Pflegemodell, das auf Routinedaten einer gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung...

This paper empirically assesses the selection effects and determinants of the demand for supple-mental health insurance that covers hospital and dental benefits in Germany. Our representative dataset provides doctor-diagnosed indicators of the individual's health status, risk attitude, demand...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private longterm health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the...