Rules of consumer protection or fair competition can be publicly or privately enforced. We consider the possibility of false advertising by a firm in duopolistic competition where consumers can be distinguished according to whether or not they form rational beliefs about the trustworthiness of...

Rules of consumer protection or fair competition can be publicly or privately enforced. We consider the possibility of false advertising by a firm in duopolistic competition where consumers can be distinguished according to whether or not they form rational beliefs about the trustworthiness of...

This article translates and extends Becker (1968) from public law enforcement to private litigation by examining optimal legal system design in a model with private suits, signals of case strength, court error, and two types of primary behavior: harmful acts that may be deterred and benign acts...

The present paper analyzes the interaction between the economic review of the probition of abuses of a dominant position (Article 82 EC) on the one hand and the efforts to enhance private enforcement of competition law through private damage claims on the other hand. The paper argues that...

This paper discusses a number of methodological challenges that ex-post evaluation of competition policy faces. We argue that imprecise measurement and simplified analysis not only leads to unreliable results, but also triggers behavioral responses by competition authorities. Because evaluation...

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common law and civil law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common and civil law countries in the complexity,...

Judicial and scholarly descriptions of the deterrent power of civil rights damages actions rely heavily on the assumption that government officials have enough information about lawsuits alleging misconduct by their officers that they can weigh the costs and benefits of maintaining the status...

We propose and find that enhanced regulatory transparency facilitates alignment between private and public enforcement. Utilizing the SEC's 2004 decision to publicly disclose its comment letters, we explore the actions of a public enforcer (the SEC) and a private enforcer (shareholder...

Traditionally in the division of labor between the European level and the Member States it was, roughly, the European legislature that set the norms and the Member States that took care of enforcing these norms. In various policy areas, an implementation deficit has been observed, which is said...

Since the introduction of a formal commitments procedure in EU antitrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Bebchuk, 1984; Shavell, 1988)...