The use of soft law instruments is pervasive in the field of EU competition policy. This poses significant legal challenges derived from the progressive ‘hardening’ of these regulatory tools by the European Courts as a result of the application of the general principles of EU law. The...

The U.S. antitrust enforcement mechanism is criticized for being ill-adapted to ensuring competition in digital platforms. In the U.S., several bills have been introduced in Congress with the aim to create a new antitrust regulatory framework for digital platforms. This paper proposes a...

The paper explores the interdependencies between corporate and individual leniency programs. In a duopoly model where corporations are separated into representing owners and operating managers, conflicts between the two types of agents arise if the relative benefits of participating in the...

The paper offers an empirical analysis of private antitrust enforcement in Germany based on cases that were decided by courts between 2005 and 2007. The study presents information about the magnitude and nature of civil antitrust actions in Germany. The data includes inter alia, information...

This paper examines the way EU competition law is applied to the pharmaceutical sector, focusing on the approach by DG Competition and the Dutch NCA by way of example. After examining the structure and objectives of EU competition law and traditional enforcement strategies, it advocates a...

The Antitrust Marathon is a long-running series of roundtable discussions sponsored by the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies of Loyola University Chicago School of Law and the Competition Law Forum of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, focusing on enduring issues...

This paper develops a model of the birth and death of cartels in the presence of enforcement activities by a Competition Authority (CA). We distinguish three sets of interventions: (a) detecting, prosecuting and penalizing cartels; (b) actions that aim to stop cartel activity in the short-term,...

In Katsoulacos et al. (2015) we examined the welfare properties of a number of monetary penalty regimes for tackling cartels, including revenue-based penalties, the most widely used regime. We showed that for a typical industry overcharge-based penalties welfare-dominate the others. However...

We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...

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...