We provide an empirical assessment of EC cartel enforcement decisions between 2000 and 2011. Following an initial characterisation of our dataset, we especially investigate the determinants of the duration of cartel investigations. We are able to identify several key drivers of investigation...

We provide an empirical assessment of EC cartel enforcement decisions between 2000 and 2011. Following an initial characterisation of our dataset, we especially investigate the determinants of the duration of cartel investigations. We are able to identify several key drivers of investigation...

We hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics. The cartel instability is rooted in the observation that, upon cartel formation, the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be...

The paper aims at assessing the costs and benefits of antitrust enforcement. The analysis starts with an investigation of why competition is typically worth protecting followed by a collection of empirical evidence which shows that competition actually needs protection by antitrust policy in...

The major interest of antitrust law and economics with respect to predation strategies has been largely twofold. On the one hand, there has been a lively discussion on the question whether predation can basically be a rational strategy for an incumbent facing an entry threat. On the other hand,...

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...

We provide a comprehensive quantitative assessment of cartels and the related cartel enforcement process in the European Union (EU) from 2001 to 2015. In a first step, we present a detailed characterization of all cartel cases decided by the European Commission (EC) with respect to various...

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set of about 340,000 market transactions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German...