The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...

Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard core cartels can have both incentives and possibilities to detect such agreements on their own initiative...

We study the welfare effects of non-binding advance price announcements. Applying a differentiated Bertrand model with horizontal products and asymmetric information, we find that such announcements can help firms to gain information on each other thereby allowing them to achieve higher profits....

This paper demonstrates that even established and verified facts of agreements among producers are not a sufficient condition for cartel identification and, as a consequence, prosecution of agreement participants. Such requires looking at institutional details and the wider context of these and...

The introduction of the European Union (EU) Settlement Procedure in 2008 aimed at promoting the procedural efficiency of cartel investigations by the European Commission (EC). We use a data set consisting of 579 firms groups convicted by the EC for cartelization from 2000 to 2015 to investigate...