The traditional institutional model of a competition agency has assumed entrusting competition protection to a single authority. Over time, more and more often national competition authorities are being entrusted not only with competition enforcement but also with other functions (tasks). And...

Merger control plays a central role in competition policy. When assessing proposed mergers, Competition Authorities should consider its impact on all relevant markets. Large mergers between manufacturers typically impact competition, thus requiring the approval of Competition Authorities....

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...

Mergers and acquisitions shape industry competition. Effective merger remedies are important for market efficiency and consumer welfare. This paper explores the need for more flexible remedies to address changing markets after mergers. While the EU permits some flexibility with less restrictive...

We discuss a subset of vertical mergers, where the exercise of market power and the efficiencies enabled by a vertical merger reduce rivals’ profits, making rivals’ exit a potentially serious concern. Rivals’ exit can fundamentally alter the welfare analysis of vertical mergers due to the...

Both Google Android and Google Search (Shopping), along with other ongoing digital market antitrust enforcement actions, are based on foreclosure conduct that has raised difficult doctrinal questions for courts, regulators, and scholars. This emerging form of foreclosure, which some have termed...

The telecom industry in India has come a long way from enjoying natural monopolies to experiencing strong competition for services. Innovation quickly entered the scene, and competitiveness was redefined. The competitive authorities for telecommunications businesses are being forced to...

Following various proposals in the academic literature, and in the light of the observed decrease in the number of leniency applications received by European competition authorities in the period 2015 – 2020, the German Monopolies Commission (Monopolkommission) proposed in 2022 to amend the...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

The Austrian Federal Competition Authority (AFCA) invited comment on its draft guidelines for exempting “sustainability agreements” from condemnation under Austrian competition law. That law recently changed, allowing a specific exemption for otherwise anticompetitive horizontal agreements...

Production costs play a crucial role in competition policy and price regulation. A shared purpose of both policies is to keep prices close to production costs to the benefit of the consumers and of the society as a whole. The problem is that prices are per product and costs are per firm. So, the...

While economic theories indicate that market power by downstream firms can potentially counteract market power upstream, antitrust policy is opaque about whether to incorporate countervailing market power in merger analyses. We use detailed national claims data from the healthcare sector to...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

On 28 May 2021, the Competition Authority of Kenya (CAK) adopted the Retail Trade Code of Practice (RTCP). The RTCP seeks to regulate the retailer-supplier trade relationships in the Kenyan market, ensuring that retailers do not abuse their buyer power. This essay examines the contents of the...

Through its competition policy interventions the European Commission not only addresses infringements of EU competition law by the firms directly involved, but it also deters possible future anticompetitive behaviour by these firms and other market players. The present paper represents the...

The so-called excess-entry theorem (Mankiw and Whinston 1986, Suzumura and Kiyono, 1987) establishes conditions guaranteeing that more firms enter a homogeneous Cournotoligopoly in equilibrium than a benevolent government prefers. We generalise the approach and analyse the behaviour of a...

The European Green Deal (EGD) provides very ambitious policy goals, particularly related to energy transition and decarbonisation. Competition law also plays a role in the accomplishment of the objectives set in the European Green Deal. While many National Competition Authorities (NCAs) have...

Digital markets now fundamentally intertwine with our social and economic lives. International enforcement actions, the US and EU Google cases in particular, demonstrate how from a behavioural economic perspective digital platforms may be beginning to implicate antitrust’s two most fundamental...

Hub-and-spoke cartels have recently come under the spotlight of competition authorities. The Turkish Competition Authority (TCA) found five grocery retailers and a cooking oil supplier in breach of Article 4 of the Turkish competition act (the equivalent of Article 101 TFEU). In this article, we...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

This article addresses developments in the literature on The Rise of Market Power. First, it summarizes research about the result of De Loecker 2020 that the sales-weighted average markup has increased in the United States. Second, it summarizes and evaluates a set of industry studies that...

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...

Distribution cartels in the automotive sector used to be frequently dismantled and sanctioned by the European Commission and the EU Courts still some 15 years ago. In recent years, however, only a few cases have been reported at the national level of EU Member States. Is it because the...

Digitale Technologien und datengetriebene Geschäftsmodelle haben zur Entstehung einer neuen Generation von Weltmarktführern geführt, die ihre Marktposition durch die Orchestrierung digitaler Plattformen und Ökosysteme aufgebaut haben und weiter festigen. Neue Möglichkeiten der...

In this paper we analyse the bank merger between DnB and Gjensidige Bank in 2003, ranked by market share as number one and number three in the Norwegian bank market. Focusing on loans to firms, our difference-in-differences analysis shows no increase of concentration of new loans. The...

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...