Competition policy in the U.S. may be understood as a self-enforcing political bargain emerging from a repeated political interaction between two large and diffuse interest groups, consumers and producers. Absent such a bargain, regulatory policy would fluctuate between pro-producer policies...

Competition authorities impose substantial penalties on firms engaging in illegal pricefixing. We examine how basing cartel fines on either revenue, profit, or price overcharge influences cartel and market prices, as well as cartel incidence and stability. In an infinitely repeated Bertrand...

We investigate the effects of passive backward acquisitions in their efficient upstream supplier on downstream firms' ability to collude in a dynamic game of price competition with homogeneous goods. We find that passive backward acquisitions impede downstream collusion. The main driver of our...

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...

The experimental literature on antitrust enforcement provides robust evidence that communication plays an important role for the formation and stability of cartels. We extend these studies through a design that distinguishes between innocuous communication and communication about a cartel,...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the new Council Regulation (EC) 1/2003 which replaces the mandatory notification and authorization system by a legal exception system. Effectiveness is operationalized via the two subcriteria compliance to Art. 81 EC Treaty and the probabilities of...

The conventional wisdom is that the FTC was the governmental equivalent of a leper colony prior to 1969, and its credibility and reputation were restored only by the adoption of the wise recommendations in the 1969 ABA Report. There is no question that the FTC deserves plenty of criticism for...