The UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has been a highly rated competition law enforcer. Yet its antitrust performance activities fall far short of this image. Here a critical assessment is made of the OFT's antitrust enforcement activities, and the claim that there is quantitative survey evidence...

Despite the adoption of the European Damages Directive and its transposition to national legal systems, a number of obstacles to antitrust damages actions in the EU still persist. Such obstacles stem from both substantial and procedural aspects. Information and data available to plaintiffs and...

This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in the digital sector. We first discuss the most crucial features of digital markets such as network effects, multi-sidedness, big data, and rapid innovation that create important challenges for competition...

The rise of new software platforms presents regulators and antitrust agencies all over the world with a challenge. Should regulations adapt to the new services of the digital economy? Should competition law change its paradigm in relation to the sharing economy? Despite the growing expansion of...

In this paper, we will analyse further the issue of concurrence between competition and sector rules and the relation between parallel concepts within the two different legal frameworks. We will firstly examine Third Party Access in relation to essential facilities doctrine and refusal of access...

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...

Waste management has gradually become an issue of major economic importance. Many operators have developed economic activities, creating, in so doing, a host of markets. The application of competition law on such markets will be assessed in this contribution, regarding more especially the...

Most late 19th-century US economists gave a rather cool welcome to the Sherman Act (1890), but not to the Clayton and FTC Acts (1914). A large literature has identified several explanations for this attitude, calling into play the relation between big business and competition, a non-neoclassical...

Directive 2014/104/EU was written on the assumption that the private enforcement of competition law is a matter of tort in all Member States. While doubts about this issue may have been brought up by some during the legislative process, they are not reflected in the final text. This assumption...

Mergers may lead to certain competitive harms that are prohibited by virtually every merger control regime in the world. To avoid the outright prohibition of a transaction that is expected to both raise several competition concerns and create pro-competitive efficiencies, the transaction may be...