The paper starts with a description of major reforms of EU policy in the network industries. Based on the normative economics of regulation, it then points out generic information and transaction cost problems of regulatory policy making. An appropriate allocation of regulatory competencies may...

Die Schaffung eines Binnenmarktes ohne wirtschaftliche und rechtliche Hemmnisse ist oberstes Ziel der Europäischen Gemeinschaft. Während bereits viele Unternehmen die Möglichkeiten des europäischen Binnenmarktes ausschöpfen, ist das Kaufverhalten der Verbraucher im grenzüberschreitenden...

Both in US antitrust and EU competition policy a development to a broader appli-cation of rule of reason instead of per se rules can be observed. In the European discussion the attempt to base competition policy on a more economic approach is mainly viewed as im-proving the economic analysis in...

In this paper, the introduction of direct-democratic decision-making in all EU decisions is considered when it is feasible without prohibitively increasing decision-making costs. We start with the contractarian argument that each constitution is a contract joining the citizens of a state and...

The EU competition policy in regard to vertical restraints is mainly based upon neoclassical efficiency-oriented reasonings, leading to a neglect of the innovation dimension. This paper analyses to what extent evolutionary theories of competition and innovation economics can be used to derive...

This paper outlines the importance of labor mobility for the improvement in allocating and distributing economic resources. We are faced with an increasing lack of skilled workers and a growing tendency of unemployment amongst the low-skilled. A central political objective for the future will...

The majority of the Member States of the European Union have undertaken remarkably comprehensive welfare and labor market reforms in the years since the 1990s. Many of these reforms, however, have not followed the conventional retrenchment and deregulation recipes, but rather took a liking to...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...

This paper outlines the importance of labor mobility for the improvement in allocating and distributing economic resources. We are faced with an increasing lack of skilled workers and a growing tendency of unemployment amongst the low-skilled. A central political objective for the future will...

The study of policy discourse comprises actor-centered and content-oriented approaches. We attempt to close the gap between the two kinds of approaches by introducing a new methodology for the analysis of political discourse called Discourse Network Analysis. It is based on social network...