This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the deterrence properties of a competition policy regime. On the basis of the economic theory of law enforcement we identify several factors that are likely to affect its degree of deterrence: 1) sanctions and damages; 2) financial and human...

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of competition policy by estimating its impact on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth for 22 industries in 12 OECD countries over the period 1995-2005. We ?nd a robust positive and signi?cant effect of competition policy asmeasured by...

In softening price competition at the tendering stage, a bidding ring may jeopardize the buyer's effort to award a procurement contract at her most advantageous economic conditions. By exploiting the similarities between oligopolistic and procurement markets, we discuss how structural conditions...

We review current methods for calculating fines against cartels in the US and EU, and simulate their deterrence effects under different assumptions on the legal and economic environment. It is likely that European fines have not had significant deterrence effects before leniency programs were...

Most of the literature on monetary policy delegation assumes that the government can credibly commit to the delegation contract, an assumption criticized by McCallum. This paper provides foundations for the assumption that renegotiating a delegation contract can be costly by illustrating how...

We find that contrary to common perception, cooperation as equilibrium of the infinitely repeated discounted prisoner's dilemma is in many relevant cases not very plausible, or at least questionable: for a significant subset of the payoff-discount factor parameter space cooperation equilibria...