In dozens of cases each year alleging horizontal price fixing and other per se violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, the central issue is whether the defendants ever formed an agreement. One source of uncertainty in resolving this issue in litigation is the meaning of “tacit...

Several competition authorities consider the exemption of horizontal agreements among firms from antitrust liability if the agreements sufficiently promote public interest objectives such as sustainable consumption and production. We show that when consumers value sustainable products and firms...

The UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has been a highly rated competition law enforcer. Yet its antitrust performance activities fall far short of this image. Here a critical assessment is made of the OFT's antitrust enforcement activities, and the claim that there is quantitative survey evidence...

Many cartels are formed by individual managers of different firms, but not by firms as collectives. However, most of the literature in industrial economics neglects individuals' incentives to form cartels. Although oligopoly experiments reveal important insights on individuals acting as firms,...

Based on an analysis of cartel prosecutions since 2007, this article assesses the way the European Commission has built up its fines in practice. The fines are compared with those imposed by the European Commission over the period from 1999 to 2006. The main findings are that, while fines have...

There have been a number of studies attempting to quantify the impact of cartels and mergers on prices. The state of the art of empirical analysis related to antitrust is best illustrated by the research of John Connor and John Kwoka. Connor summarizes the existing empirical research that...

At first glance, Holmes's general prominence in American jurisprudence does not appear to carry over into antitrust law. His antitrust opinions often appear to a modern reader perverse. Early in his tenure on the Supreme Court, he opined in his famous dissent in Northern Securities Co. v. United...

We investigate the accuracy of UPP as a tool in antitrust analysis when there are cost efficiencies from a horizontal merger. We include model-based, merger-specific cost efficiencies in a tractable manner and extend the standard UPP formulation to account for these efficiencies. The efficacy of...

This article presents eight critical points that can aid the ongoing and early development of antitrust policy relating to common ownership. These points touch on some of the most salient issues concerning the relationship between common ownership and competitive harm and have important...

For criminal violations of the Sherman Act, although guided by federal sentencing guidelines, U.S. Department of Justice has great latitude in recommending corporate cartel fines to the federal courts, and its recommendations are nearly always determinative. In this paper, we analyze the...