Classical approaches to the law, even statutory law, teach that its purpose is to codify behavioral rules creating clear expectations about the consequences of human interactions. Stability and predictability are the rule of law’s hallmarks. The present essay explores those principles within...

Five great attempts have been made to achieve a true international harmonization of competition law in the twentieth century. None has been successful. Despite the failures of the League of Nations, the International Trade Organization (ITO), the Economic and Social Council of the United...

The introduction of the European Union (EU) Settlement Procedure in 2008 aimed at promoting the procedural efficiency of cartel investigations by the European Commission (EC). We use a data set consisting of 579 firms groups convicted by the EC for cartelization from 2000 to 2015 to investigate...

We use a dataset of 615 firms which participated in 114 illegal cartels - convicted by the European Commission between 1999 and 2016 - to investigate the determinants of the duration of a firm's participation in a cartel. Applying a Weibull proportional hazard model with a particular focus on...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be...

In 2008, the European Commission investigated E.ON, a large and vertically integrated electricity company, for the alleged abuse of a joint dominant position by strategically withholding generation capacity. The case was settled after E.ON agreed to divest 5,000 MW generation capacity as well as...

There is a growing concern that minority shareholding (MS) in rival firms may facilitate collusion. To examine this concern, we exploit the fact that leniency programs (LPs) are generally recognized as a shock that destabilizes collusive agreements and study the effect that the introduction of...

The importance of economics to the analysis and enforcement of competition policy and law has increased tremendously in the developed market economies in the past forty years. In younger and developing market economies, competition law itself has a history of twenty to twenty-five years at most...

The digital revolution has reinvigorated the discussion about the problem how to consider innovation in the application of competition law. This raises difficult questions about the relationship between competition and innovation as well as what kind of assessment concepts competition...

Competition agency guidelines, policy statements and related advocacy are an important vehicle for policy expression and the guidance of firms across the full spectrum of anti-competitive practices and market conduct. The role of guidelines and policy statements has, arguably, been particularly...