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...

Nowadays, merger control predominantly relies upon a strict analysis of the effects from merger and acquisitions on effective competition. However, there is scope for so-called public interest considerations in several European merger control regimes and recently a number of European politicians...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be...

In 2008, the European Commission investigated E.ON, a large and vertically integrated electricity company, for the alleged abuse of a joint dominant position by strategically withholding generation capacity. The case was settled after E.ON agreed to divest 5,000 MW generation capacity as well as...

Ownership of publicly listed German companies has undergone significant changes in recent years. The aim of this report is to document these trends since 2007 and analyze the extent to which firms that compete in the same product market are owned by the same investors, which is known as common...

After earlier waves of privatization, local governments have increasingly taken back control of local service provisions in some sectors and countries and, instead, started providing those services themselves (reverse privatization). Using a unique panel data set on the mode of service provision...

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...

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....

The German Federal Cartel Office and the Austrian Federal Competition Authority have recently published a draft "Guidance on Transaction Value Thresholds for Mandatory Pre-merger Notification (Section 35(1a) GWB and Section 9(4) KartG)" for public consultation. Prof. Dr. Christian Kersting,...

In 2008, the European Commission investigated E.ON, a large and vertically integrated electricity company, for the alleged abuse of a joint dominant position by strategically withholding generation capacity. The case was settled after E.ON agreed to divest 5,000 MW generation capacity as well as...