Wheras non-price restrictions such as exclusive territories are often tolerated while Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) is rather unanimously forbidden, the economic analysis shows so far that both types of restraints have positive and negative effects on welfare, in such a way that the balance is...

The adoption of performance related pay schemes has become increasingly popular in the public sector of several countries. In the UK, the scheme designers favoured collective performance pay with the aim to foster cooperation across offices. The resulting team structure included several offices...

Asymmetric information in procurement entails double marginalization. The phenomenon is most severe when the buyer has all the bargaining power at the production stage, while it vanishes when the buyer and suppliers’ weights are balanced. Vertical integration eliminates double marginalization...

The European Commission recently considered abolishing the notification system and to focus on a regime of ex post investigation. Our objective is to show that a better understanding of markets can justify this reform. When the precision of the competition authority?s analysis is not high...

The paper presents recent advances in the analysis of successive oligopolies characterized by "interlocking relationships", where competing upstream suppliers deal with the same set of competing downstream partners. We first highlight the extent to which interlocking relationships alter...

Council Regulation (EC) 1/2003 came into force on the 1st of May 2004 replacing themandatory notification of agreements between firms by a regime of ex post monitoring.This paper provides a theoretical justification for this shift based on the competitionauthority’s accuracy of judgement. We...

A supplier is known to be subject to opportunism when contracting secretly with downstream competitors, particularly when downstream firms have "passive beliefs.'' We stress that in many situations, an equilibrium with passive beliefs may not exist and passive beliefs appear less plausible than...

The ''portfolio effect theory'' developed by the European Commission in merger control is at the center of a fierce international row with the US authorities who believe that this theory has no economic foundations. This paper aims to provide a counter-argument and shows that full-line forcing...

A supplier is known to be subject to opportunism when contracting secretly with downstream competitors, particularly when downstream firms have "passive beliefs." We stress that in many situations, an equilibrium with passive beliefs may not exist and passive beliefs appear less plausible than...

Frauds can be explained not only in terms of individual willingness to cheat, but may also be driven by opportunities to behave dishonestly. The audit policy should therefore be different for different categories of agents. This paper focuses on the optimal audit policy when there are two...