This paper examines retail competition in a liberalized gas market. Vertically integrated firms run both wholesale activities (buying gas from the producers under take-or-pay obligations) and retail activities (selling gas to final customers). The market is decentralized and the firms decide...

In this chapter, we review some recent work on public intervention in economic environments where firms undertake investments in research or in physical assets, and then select appropriate business practices to extract profits from the outcomes of the investment process. Public policies may take...

We study the interaction of a firm that invests in research and, if successful, undertakes a business practice to exploit the innovation, and an enforcer that sets legal standards, fines and accuracy. In this setting deterrence on actions interacts with deterrence on research. When the practice...

This outstanding collection of original essays brings together some of the leading experts in competition economics, policy and law. They examine what lies at the core of the ‘economic approach to competition law’ and deal with its normative and institutional limitations. In recent...

When firms' research can lead to potentially harmful innovations, public intervention may thwart their incentives to undertake research by reducing its expected profitability (average deterrence) and may guide the use of innovation (marginal deterrence). We compare four policy regimes: laissez...

We analyze optimal policy design when firms' research activity may lead to socially harmful innovations. Public intervention, affecting the expected profitability of innovation, may both thwart the incentives to undertake research (average deterrence) and guide the use to which innovation is put...

We study the enforcement of competition policy against collusion under Leniency Programs, which give reduced fines to firms revealing information to the Antitrust Authority. Such programs give firms an incentive to break collusion, but may also have a pro-collusive effect, since they decrease...

This paper analyses the sources of buyer power and its effect on sellers’ investment in quality improvements. In our model retailers make take-it-or-leave-it offers to a producer and each of them obtains its marginal contribution to total profits (gross of sunk costs). In turn, this depends on...

This report argues in favour of an economics-based approach to Article 82, in a way similar to the reform of Article 81 and merger control.