The central claim of this Article is that, as a descriptive matter, trademark legislation and court interpretation is a close normative match with the Chicago School approach of scholars such as Robert Bork and Richard Posner. The organizing intellectual structure of modern trademark law, as...

This paper explores the impact of ordoliberal thinking on the drafting of the prohibition of “abuse” of a dominant position in the market that was included in the competition rules of the Rome Treaty establishing the European Economic Community as well as on its interpretation by the...

Friedrich A. von Hayek’s (1899-1992) view of competition as a discovery process is well known but little used. His central thesis is that a competitive pricing system is the most effective way to coordinate economic activity and economise on the information held by market participants in a...

We take for granted that the basic choice in public policy is between allocation of resources by government bureaucracy, on the one hand, or allocation by markets, on the other. But that dichotomy is false, and at least under contemporary circumstances it is more accurate to describe the choice...

The paper examines the viability of applying transaction cost reasoning to the government by discussing the possibility of further international cooperation in the field of antitrust. Given that, in their international relations, the analogy between states and private actors is more realistic...

Administrative enforcement of China's Anti-Monopoly Law is shared among three ministries, and a pan-ministry commission sits above these ministries to coordinate competition policy. This two-tiered tripartite enforcement structure has been criticized as inefficient, costly, and ineffective. In...

This paper analyses all final merger decisions by the European Commission from the beginning of 1990 up to the end of 2019. We use a novel dataset, containing information about 6245 merger cases from all economic sectors and combining all sorts of decisions, inclusive of withdrawn and prohibited...

We investigate the relationship between public and private enforcers introducing a more differentiated approach. In contrast to the existing literature, we take into account that the costs and benefits of detection and prosecution and, thus, the usefulness of each enforcement mode may change...

With the "more economic approach" the EU is taking a new tack on merger control policy. This is visible not only in the new SIEC prohibition criterion and the criteria for appraising horizontal mergers but also in more recent decision-making practice. Greater legal certainty, on the one hand,...

The paper develops a four-step framework to detect anticompetitive horizontal mergers. In the first step, an estimate of the impact of the merger on the market price needs to be derived. Subsequent, the second step of the framework has to assess whether such a predicted price increase would be...