Patent settlements between rivals restrain competition in many different ways. Antitrust requires that their anticompetitive effects are reasonably commensurate with the firms’ expectations about (counterfactual) patent litigation. Because these expectations are private and non-verifiable,...

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for...

This article examines the meaning and scope of the notion of anticompetitive effects in EU competition law. It does so by bringing together several strands of the case law (and this across all provisions, namely Articles 101 and 102 TFEU and merger control). The analysis is structured around a...

• Pay-for-delay cases raise fundamental points of law, including the notion of (potential) competition and restriction by object.• According to the rich case law addressing the relationship between Article 101(1) TFEU and intellectual property – including Nungesser and BAT (Toltecs-Dorcet)...

Every year thousands of firms are engaged in research joint ventures (RJV), where all knowledge gained through R&D is shared among members. Most of the empirical literature assumes members are non-cooperative in the product market. But many RJV members are rivals leaving open the possibility...

Current controversies over patent policy place standard-setting organizations (SSOs) on a collision course with antitrust law. Recent theoretical research conjectures that, in an SSO, patent owners can “hold up” patent users in the sense of demanding high royalties for a patented input after...

This paper explores the effects that collusion can have in newspaper markets where firms compete for advertising as well as for readership. We compare three modes of competition: i) competition in the advertising and the reader market, ii) semi-collusion over advertising (with competition in the...

Assuming deterministic demand Liski and Montero (2006) show that forward trading is able to facilitate collusion. We present a more concise model incorporating the main reason for forward trading: Uncertainty. In general, fluctuations make collusion harder to sustain (Rotemberg and Saloner,...

Der Blick auf eine angemessene Wettbewerbsordnung hat sich im Laufe der Jahrzehnte vielfach gewandelt. Dazu trugen sowohl der technologische Wandel als auch ein tieferes Verständnis der ökonomischen Zusammenhänge bei. Aktuell muss die Wettbewerbspolitik das Gesetz gegen...