How the new leniency program in Korea affect cartel formation and cartel detection?

The corporate leniency program has played an important role in detecting cartels that damages consumer welfare and competition. This study investigates the impacts of Korea¡¯s leniency revision in 2005 on cartel stability by using a Poisson regression. The estimation results show that the new leniency program increases the detection rate and decreases the formation rate, confirming the validity of the theoretical model of Miller(2008). Therefore, the effectiveness of the full leniency to the first applicants under the new leniency program provides some policy implication on the revision direction of the leniency program.