A substantial number of cartels in the European Union are detected and enforced by the national competition authorities (NCAs). The effectiveness of domestic enforcement has been subject to extensive review and debates, which have recently culminated and resulted in the proposal for the ECN+...

This paper demonstrates that the concepts of harm and damages as they are used in tort law pose some serious conceptual problems in the area of antitrust law. Consequently, there are some limits to the private enforcement of antitrust law via damages actions that have to be taken into account...

Since 1996, the European Commission has been operating a leniency programme, under which companies cooperating with its cartel investigations can obtain immunity from fines or a reduction of fines. Leniency plays a prominent role in EU cartel enforcement today. This paper assesses the positive...

Based on a sample of 64 cartels convicted by the European Commission from 1975 to 2009 and a methodology allowing to estimate restitution and dissuasive fines to be imposed on cartels from microeconomic variables on a case by case basis, this paper compares the level of fines actually inflicted...

Governments around the world spend an estimated $9.5 trillion of public money purchasing goods and services each year (public procurement). Not only does this represent a significant proportion of government expenditure (29.1 percent on average in OECD countries) and of total gross domestic...

This paper studies cartels' strategic behavior in delaying leniency applications, a take-up decision that has been ignored in the previous literature. Using European Commission decisions issued over a 16-year span, we show, contrary to common beliefs and the existing literature, that...

This article provides a model of two risk-neutral firms that may cooperate to achieve a goal that is potentially illegal. The model assumes enforcement risk and firms that are imperfectly informed about antitrust law enforcement. It is shown that compliance training, which educates the agents...

We study the timing of leniency applications using a novel application of multi-spell discrete-time survival analysis for a sample of cartels prosecuted by the European Commission between 1996 and 2014. The start of a Commission investigation does not affect the rate by which conspirators apply...

We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...