We study empirically the price effects of upstream cartels that sell through downstream retailers to final consumers. We focus on a German coffee producer cartel that colluded under two different regimes: (i) involving wholesale prices in 2003 and (ii) with additional resale price maintenance...

Antitrust authorities all over the world are concerned if a particularly aggressive competitor, a "maverick", is bought out of the market. Yet there is a lack of theoretical justification. One plausible determinant of acting as a maverick is behavioral: the maverick derives utility from acting...

Antitrust is back in vogue at the U.S. Supreme Court. Whereas the Rehnquist Court decided few antitrust cases in its latter years (only one from 1993 to 1995, one each year from 1996 through 1999, and none from 2000 to 2003), the Roberts Court issued seven antitrust decisions in its first two...

Recent merger decisions by competition authorities have revived the debate on the relationship between competition and innovation. This article reviews this issue by drawing on the relevant economic literature, and by placing it in the broader policy debate on the benefits of competitive...

The paper first summarizes the benefits of competition, i.e. why competitive markets are more efficient than oligopolistic or monopolistic markets, and the threats to competitive markets from cartels, concentration, and government interference. In the main part, the paper presents the key...

In today’s digital economy, online competitive advertising plays a central role in informing consumers about low prices and other desirable product features. Accordingly, rivals have a strong incentive and opportunity to place anticompetitive limits on the flow of information. They do so by...

The flow of resources across sectors to their best use, with concomitant entry and exit, is central to the functioning and welfare properties of a market economy. Nevertheless, most industrial organization research, including applications to competition policy, undertakes partial equilibrium...

Some scholars have argued that the phenomenon known as common ownership, which refers to an investor's simultaneous ownership of small stockholdings in several competing companies, is anticompetitive and prohibited by the U.S. antitrust laws. These proponents target in particular large...

Horizontal shareholdings exist when a common set of investors own significant shares in corporations that are horizontal competitors in a product market. Economic models show that substantial horizontal shareholdings are likely to anticompetitively raise prices when the owned businesses compete...

A phenomenon known as “Common Ownership” arises when shareholders hold substantial stakes in competing firms. Although recent empirical evidence has illustrated how common concentrated owners are associated with higher product market prices and lower output, scholars remain divided as to the...