Advanced economic instruments like simulation models are enjoying an increased popularity in practical antitrust. There is hope that they being quantitative predictive economic evidence can substitute for qualitative structural analysis and lead to unambiguous results. This paper demonstrates...

Advances in competition economics as well as in computational and empirical methods have offered the scope for the employment of merger simulation models in merger control procedures during the past almost 15 years. Merger simulation is, nevertheless, still a very young and innovative instrument...

Can competition law also take into account effects on privacy or should privacy concerns of data-collecting behaviour only be dealt with by data protection law? In this paper we are analysing the German Facebook case, in which certain terms of service (that force consumers to give consent for...

In competition law, the problem of the optimal design of institutional and procedural rules concerns assessment processes of the pro- and anticompetitiveness of business behaviors. This is well recognized in the discussion about the relative merits of different assessment principles such as the...

Patent settlements between originator and generic firms in the pharmaceutical industry have been challenged by antitrust and competition authorities in the U.S. and the EU. Particularly settlements with large "reverse payments" to generic firms raise the concern of collusive behaviour for...

Since the patent system relies on private litigation for challenging weak patents, and patent settlements might influence the incentives for challenging patents, the question arises whether the antitrust assessment of patent settlements should also consider their impact on the incentives to...

In many cases, collusive agreements are formed by asymmetric firms and include only a subset of the firms active in the cartelized industry. This paper endogenizes the process of cartel formation in a numeric simulation model where firms differ in marginal costs and production technologies. The...

Patent settlements between originator and generic firms in the pharmaceutical industry have been challenged by antitrust and competition authorities in the U.S. and the EU. Particularly Settlements with large "reverse payments" to generic firms raise the concern of collusive behaviour for...

When enacting labor market regulation governments face courts that interpret and implement the legal code. We show that the incentives for governments for labor market reform increase with the uncertainty that is involved in the implementation of legal codes through courts. Given that judges...

In this note we analyze how aging affects immigration policy. We set up a dynamic political-economy model of representative democracy in which the government of the destination country sets the immigration level to maximize aggregate welfare of the constituency. Aging, i.e. a decline in the...