The collective sale of football broadcasting rights constitutes a cartel, which, in the European Union, is only allowed if it complies with a number of conditions and obligations, inter alia, partial unbundling and the no-single-buyer rule. These regulations were defined with traditional...

We model merger control procedures as a process of sequential acquisition of information in which mergers can be cleared after a first phase of investigation. We find that the enforceability of clearance decisions at the end of the first phase is unattractive to the extent that it prevents the...

The EU Leniency Programme (LP) aims to encourage the dissolution of existing cartels and the deterrence of future cartels, through spontaneous reporting and/or significant cooperation by cartel members during an investigation. However, the European Commission guidelines are rather vague in terms...

Over the last decade a large body of economic research has emerged that has sought to empirically test the effectiveness of leniency policies as tools to enhance the detection, prosecution and deterrence of cartel conduct. This research has considerable potential value in assisting competition...

The theoretical framework of the adequacy or otherwise of fine reductions under the EU and US Leniency Programmes has been explored widely. However, the characteristics of the reporting cartel members remain unexplained. This is the first paper to develop a model where heterogeneous cartel...

Cartels remain widespread and constitute a major problem for society. Leniency policies reduce or cancel the sanctions for the first firm(s) that self-report being part of a cartel and have become the main enforcement instrument used by competition authorities around the world in their fight...

We investigate the relationship between public and private enforcers introducing a more differentiated approach. In contrast to the existing literature, we take into account that the costs and benefits of detection and prosecution and, thus, the usefulness of each enforcement mode may change...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of methods for the empirical ex post evaluation of merger control decisions. It develops a competition-policy oriented framework of assessment criteria for the leading evaluation methods and applies them to structural modeling and simulation,...

Naturally, competition policy is based on competition economics made applicable in terms of law and its enforcement. Within the different branches of competition economics, modern industrial economics, or more precisely gametheoretic oligopoly theory, has become the dominating paradigm both in...

Practices and conducts in professional and even amateur sports can be subject to competition laws as soon as commercial activities are involved. From an economic perspective, this implies that both directly commercial activities like the sale of broadcasting/media rights and indirectly...