This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

Practices and conducts in professional and even amateur sports can be subject to competition laws as soon as commercial activities are involved. From an economic perspective, this implies that both directly commercial activities like the sale of broadcasting/media rights and indirectly...

Industry-wide voluntary agreements are touted as a means for corporations to take more corporate social responsibility (CSR). We study what type of joint CSR agreement induces firms to increase CSR efforts in a model of oligopolistic competition with differentiated products. Consumers have a...

Predicting the future is difficult. Advances in economics and antitrust law's ability to incorporate such changes have been tremendous in the past 15 years. In 1985, Robert Zumekis' movie Back to the Future came out. In that movie, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels back in time from 1985 to...

Based on a sample of 64 cartels convicted by the European Commission from 1975 to 2009 and a methodology allowing to estimate restitution and dissuasive fines to be imposed on cartels from microeconomic variables on a case by case basis, this paper compares the level of fines actually inflicted...

Cartels remain widespread and constitute a major problem for society. Leniency policies reduce or cancel the sanctions for the first firm(s) that self-report being part of a cartel and have become the main enforcement instrument used by competition authorities around the world in their fight...

Antitrust and competition law have grown dramatically in importance and significance over the last fifty years. US antitrust law has been the principal source of inspiration for jurisdictions wishing to introduce regulation to control cartels and monopolization, and antitrust regulation has now...

This chapter deals with cartel fines as sanctions to deter cartelization. The concept of cartel fines as a deterrent is based on the premise that a potential cartelist will refrain from joining a cartel if the expected fine will exceed or at least offset any cartel gains. Based on a simple...

This paper focuses on the genesis, taxonomy and timeline of U.S. criminal antitrust investigations, and uses time-series data on enforcement to examine the interrelationships between the various criminal enforcement variables as well as the linkages between criminal and civil enforcement. The...

Cartel practices attract enormous corporate fines, even where they only involve a handful of employees. Internal compliance programmes are thought to protect firms by training employees and auditing their activities. However, this paper argues that such programmes are ineffective because...