The fight against cartels is a priority for antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. What differs between the EU and the US is not the basic toolkit for achieving deterrence, but to whom it is targeted. In the EU, pecuniary sanctions against the firm are the only instruments...

Around 2012, authorities discovered one of the most complex set of cartels in the world in its construction industry. Dozens of companies large and small colluded on the price of bids for public works in several cities in the Province of Quebec over a decade or more. Bidding firms, some with...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

The introduction of the European Union (EU) Settlement Procedure in 2008 aimed at promoting the procedural efficiency of cartel investigations by the European Commission (EC). We use a data set consisting of 579 firms groups convicted by the EC for cartelization from 2000 to 2015 to investigate...

We investigate the impact of cartel breakdowns on merger activity. Merging information on cartel cases decided by the European Commission (EC) between 2000 and 2011 with a detailed data set of worldwide merger activity, we find that, first, the average number of all merger transactions increase...

We analyze horizontal mergers when the acquirer holds a passive partial ownership stake (PPO) in the target firm prior to the merger. We show that a PPO reduces the minimal synergy level necessary to make a merger beneficial for consumers. It follows that an antitrust authority ignoring existing...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be...

Firm strategies cannot be analyzed without taking into consideration the legal framework which governs the relationships between economic agents, especially competition law. As a consequence, firms have to maneuver through a complex universe, taking account of both the rules of the economic game...

Big Tech is in the news. At the center of our political and economic dialogue is the effect that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have on our lives and what, if anything, governments should do about it. In this short piece, I explain how Big Tech has come under scrutiny, the antitrust...

This paper offers a theoretical model for the analysis of illegal cartels. Given the nature of the cartel, retaliation is also illegal. To assess the stability of collusion as a criminal organization, we propose a one-shot game based on Bertrand competition with product differentiation. We...