Since the turn of the century, economists have understood that multi-sided markets function in ways that are importantly different from standard markets. Since the ground-breaking work on the topic by Rochet & Tirole, huge progress has been made in modelling these markets and the way they work,...

Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914, displeased with its initial foray into competition policy, the Sherman Act. Congress desired to create a Commission comprised of “trained, skillful [people]…. clothed with adequate authority” who could provide “more complete and...

This paper critically discusses the use of remedies in pursuing distributive justice through the restoration of competition, deterrence and disgorgement. The paper addresses more specifically the design and objectives of the Pioneer Foods settlement agreement. The remedies that were concluded...

In August 2008, the Polish Competition and Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) referred to the European Commission the results of its proceedings concerning the conditions of sale of laptops with a pre-installed Windows operating system. According to the CCPA, Microsoft and laptop manufacturers...

This paper empirically models the longer-run deep-seated shift in intellectual thinking that followed the Chicago School's criticism of the older antitrust doctrine, the shorter-run driving forces related to switches of the political party in power, merger waves, changes in economic activity and...

The effects of monopoly power or mergers on incentives to innovate are important issues for antitrust enforcement, but they receive relatively little attention in litigated cases compared to the analysis of predicted effects on prices. This paper reviews what is known about the relationship...

We formulate a simple model of optimal defensive disclosure by a dominant firm facing uncertain antitrust enforcement and test its implications using unique data on defensive disclosures and patents by IBM. Our results indicate that stronger antitrust enforcement leads to more defensive...

Since China has modeled its antitrust regime on that of the EU, there are essentially two antitrust regime types: the U.S. and the EU. This chapter is a brief comparative study of the two regimes. I focus on three categories in which fundamental differences are observed: enforcement, legal...

The paper provides a comprehensive survey of the economics behind the fight against hard core cartels. Differentiating between four subsequent stages – characterisation, welfare effects, enforcement and evaluation – the paper pays particular attention to cartel detection methods, the...