Civil liability of rating agencies has to strike a balance between over-deterrence and overly lax behavior control. The resulting problems of a capital market freeze and difficulties of proof, as they become apparent in most legal systems and the European Commission's Draft Proposal to amend the...

A fully unbundled, regulated network firm of unknown efficiency level can untertake unobservable effort to increase the likelihood of low downstream prices, e.g. by facilitating downstream competition. To incentivize such effort, the regulator can use an incentive scheme paying transfers to the...

We develop a simple model of banking regulation with two policy instruments: minimum capital requirements and supervision of domestic banks. The regulator faces a trade-off: high capital requirements cause a drop in the banks' profitability, while strict supervision reduces the scope of...

We develop a simple model of banking regulation with two policy instruments: minimum capital requirements and supervision of domestic banks. The regulator faces a trade-off: high capital requirements cause a drop in the banks'; profitability, while strict supervision reduces the scope of...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

In a two-stage model insurance companies first decide upon risk classification and then compete in prices. I show that the observed heterogeneous behavior of similar firms is compatible with rational behavior. On the deregulated German insurance market individual application of classification...

This paper analyzes the incentives to invest in Next Generation Access Networks (NGA) in a framework with horizontal product differentiation with price competition between an investing and an access seeking firm. Given uncertainty about the success of the NGA, I compare regulatory regimes with...

Why do good bankers at times respond unanimously with the same disastrous strategy? Rooted in regulatory economics and behavioural finance, the paper offers a taxonomy of effects that narrow banks decision scope into funnel-shaped and thus prepared the ground for the financial crisis. The basic...

One of the most controversial theories of harm in competition law in general and within the category of exploitative abuses in particular is excessive prices. While many arguments have been given against excessive price cases, there also exist many arguments in favour of such cases. Furthermore...