This special issue marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of a leniency program for antitrust in the EU and contains five original papers: Each paper examines the effects of design parameters of leniency programs on their performance. Before introducing each contribution separately, we...

Judging by only economic incentives, Malaysian financial institutions (particularly banks) should completely ignore the Competition Act. The data show that Malaysian banks probably benefit from anticompetitive behaviour. Political and family connections likely facilitate such behaviour. Given...

Aim: The purpose of this paper is to bring together theory and policy of (personal) income distribution on the one hand and competition policy on the other hand. Design / research: The methods used in this paper cover a brief model set-up, followed by a numerical model-calibration. Thereafter,...

This paper analyses the new discipline on state-owned enterprises contained in the recently concluded Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, and evaluates various factors that influenced the shaping of its specific rules. The new discipline consolidates and strengthens related provisions in...

Brunei must enact an effective competition policy in order to participate as a member in regional trading blocs like the APEC, ASEAN and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. What effect would Brunei's Competition Order have on Brunei - and specifically its small and medium enterprises or SMEs (the...

We analyze maximal cartel prices in infinitely-repeated oligopoly models under leniency where fines are linked to illegal gains, as often outlined in existing antitrust regulation, and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. We introduce cartel culture that describes how...

We provide a comprehensive quantitative assessment of cartels and the related cartel enforcement process in the European Union (EU) from 2001 to 2015. In a first step, we present a detailed characterization of all cartel cases decided by the European Commission (EC) with respect to various...

We analyze how leniency affects cartel pricing in an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model where the fine rates are linked to illegal gains and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. A novel aspect of this study is that we focus on the worst possible outcome. We investigate the...

Both the academic literature and the policy debate on systematic bailout guarantees and Government subsidies have ignored an important effect: in industries where firms may go out of business due to idiosyncratic shocks, Governments may increase the likelihood of (tacit) coordination if they set...

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,...