Business Law and Economics for Civil Law Systems : Competition Law

Part of a larger textbook on business law and economics, this Chapter surveys how economic analysis has been applied to competition, or antitrust, law, in the main jurisdictions on both sides of the Atlantic. The first part chronicles the successive schools of thought in the US and the EU, with emphasis on their link with the economics of the time and place where each school took shape. The second part illustrates how, in practice, the introduction of economics into the application of the law has led to trans-Atlantic convergence to a large extent, except as concerns the treatment of dominant firms. In the third part, the tools of law and economics are brought to bear to assess whether the now widespread use of economics in the application of the law has actually improved the effectiveness and efficiency of the law