In a series of recent cases - most notably in TeliaSonera and Post Danmark - the equally efficient competitor principle has been explicitly recognised by the Court of Justice of the EU; more clearly so than by courts in the US, where the principle originates. However the exact scope of...

We develop a model in which two firms that have proposed to merge are privately informed about merger-specific efficiencies. This enables the firms to influence the merger control procedure by strategically revealing their information to an antitrust authority. Although the information improves...

We show that the number of merger proposals (frequency-based deterrence) is a more appropriate indicator of underlying changes in merger policy than the relative anti-competitiveness of merger proposals (composition-based deterrence). This has strong implications for the empirical analysis 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...

The European Commission is working on a revision of its Guidelines on Research and Development Agreements. On this occasion, this note surveys the existing experimental evidence. Experiments add a number of additional arguments to the normative assessment. R&D agreements have a much smaller...

In this paper, we discuss from an economic perspective two alternative views of restrictions of competition by sports associations. The horizontal approach views such restrictions as an agreement among the participants of a sports league with the sports association merely representing an...

Lead jurisdiction models represent one option how to extend and enhance contemporary interagency cooperation among competition policy regimes. They constitute a multilateral, case-related form of cooperation that is suited to effectively create a one-stop-shop for the prosecution of...

Economists and lawyers are badly divided on issues concerning tying and bundling. Permissivie and prohibitive attitudes are changing radically in the literature and in the legal practice. After a short discurse on the notions, we introduce the basic ideas, theories and debates according to...

Economics rightfully represents the major basis for competition policy. Next to generating knowledge about competition and its welfare effects, the currently popular more-economic approach is charged with a number of additional hopes and expectations, leading to a reduction of the ambiguities of...

We demonstrate that the popular Farrell-Shapiro-framework (FSF) for the analysis of mergers in oligopolies relies regarding its policy conclusions sensitively on the assumption that rational agents will only propose privately profitable mergers. If this assumption held, a positive external...