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 article investigates the purpose and workings of EU competition law and policy: how does the protection of competition promote welfare? It scrutinizes the claim that sustainable consumption and production (SCP) requires flexible rather than strict enforcement of Article 101 TFEU. Flexible...

This article investigates the purpose and workings of EU competition law and policy: how does the protection of competition promote welfare? It scrutinizes the claim that sustainable consumption and production (SCP) requires flexible rather than strict enforcement of Article 101 TFEU. Flexible...

In this comprehensive review of ex-post merger studies price effects of horizontal transactions are evaluated. By combining and further analyzing the results of 52 retrospective studies on 82 mergers or merger-like transactions it can be shown that the industry alone is no strong indication for...

This article argues that while EU competition law rightly takes a functional approach to its subject—the undertaking and its economic activity—a string of cases has been developing leading to what this article coins as the Compass doctrine: economic activity of a public entity falling...

This paper deals with the enforcement of merger policy, and aims to study how merger remedies affect the deterrence accomplished by controlling mergers. We determine the optimal frequency of investigations launched by the agency, and identify situations where the introduction of remedies can...

We investigate cartelists’ merger behavior using European Commission (EC) cartel decisions over a 28-year span and information on cartelists’ merger activities over the last 30 years. We find that mergers occur frequently. But they cluster in a few particular industries and usually include...

We investigate cartelists' merger behavior using European Commission (EC) cartel decisions over a 28-year span and information on cartelists' merger activities over the last 30 years. We find that mergers occur frequently but that they cluster in a few particular industries and usually include...

We discuss and formally show a multi-period equilibrium in which, counter to preliminary intuition, a creator of a work, motivated by economic considerations, promotes breach of his own copyrights. In effect, by selectively enforcing copyrights, the creator is allegedly indirectly involved in...