Private antitrust litigation often involves a dominant firm being accused of exclusionary conduct by a smaller rival. In such cases, the defendant generally has a much larger financial stake in the outcome. We explore the implications of this asymmetry in a model of litigation with endogenous...

Private plaintiffs in U.S. civil litigation seeking damages alleged to have resulted from cartel activities often view the European Commission’s case file as an important source of evidence against cartel participants and seek through U.S. discovery procedures to obtain access to materials in...

In both the US and the EU, the antitrust category of “sham litigation” (in the US) or “vexatious litigation” (in the EU) enables a plaintiff, or a defendant in case this action forms part of a counterclaim, to argue that the introduction of litigation may constitute, under certain...

This article examines how the burden of proof is allocated in private antitrust suits in China, and tries to assess whether the criticism about the high burden of proof is merited. In that quest, the article lays out the general principle for the burden of proof in antitrust cases in China. It...

The study focuses on the admissibility and assessment of economic expertise in EC competition law litigation. I start by exploring the broader issues raised by the integration of economic expertise in litigation: in particular the risk of moral hazard and adverse selection because of the...

This paper challenges the classical view on the role of litigation in Japan by examining a particular type of litigation, namely private antitrust litigation. It shows that the widely held idea that antitrust litigation in Japan is rare only holds when compared to the US, not Europe. The...

The paper provides a comprehensive survey of the economics behind the fight against hard core cartels. Differentiating between four subsequent stages – characterisation, welfare effects, enforcement and evaluation – the paper pays particular attention to cartel detection methods, the...

This paper reviews the legal and economic structure of the class action litigation model in the United States, as set forth by rule 23 of US civil procedure, exploring the requirements for obtaining class certification and maintaining a class action. I analyze a number of critical issues and...

The duration of appellate court proceedings is an important determinant of the efficiency of a court system. We use data of 234 firm groups that participated in 63 cartels convicted by the European Commission between 2000 and 2012 to investigate the determinants of the duration of the subsequent...

The article studies how intensively the administrative decisions of the European Commission's counterpart - the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - are reviewed by the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal. The standard used by the U.S. courts to review FTC factual and economic findings, known as the...