After describing the essential features of the book market, a welfare analysis of the fixed book price agreement is given. Allowance is made for the opportunity cost of reading. Theoretically, the agreement pushes up book prices and depresses book sales. However, more titles will be published,...

This paper analyzes an early modern German economy to test alternative theories about guilds. It finds little evidence to support recent hypotheses arguing that guilds corrected market failures relating to product quality, training, and innovation. But it finds that guilds were social networks...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as "social networks" that generated beneficial "social capital" by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by enabling...

Sham litigation is a practice whereby a competitor misuses the adjudicatory system for the purpose of preventing or delaying the entry of competing products in the market. As a consequence, consumers cannot benefit from a decrease of prices that would otherwise take place. The effects of this...

In view of a recent judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, in the Menarini case (27 September 2011), the authors argue that the EU courts will have to scrutinize competition law fines imposed by the European Commission more closely. The Commission itself will also need to observe fair...

We study antitrust enforcement in which the fine must obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. We integrate these legal principles into an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model, where bankruptcy considerations...

The book "Procedural fairness in the proceedings before the competition authority" (published in Polish) scrutinizes the level of protection of procedural fairness in the proceedings before two competition authorities: the President of the Polish Office of Competition and Consumers Protection...