A criminal offence requiring Ghosh dishonesty was introduced in the UK by the Enterprise Act 2002, primarily to enhance cartel deterrence as a complement to corporate fines. Yet the first convictions resulted from a US plea bargain in 2008. This paper identifies three obstacles to enhancing...

Where fines are the only available sanction against cartels there is a trade-off between increased deterrence and the increased risk of insolvency. Higher fines are unacceptable to the European Commission because of the costs and uncertainties associated with bankruptcy. These concerns have led...

The past and current reluctance of firms and individuals to use private enforcement suggests that there are limited incentives for self-help. The key contribution of private enforcement to overall deterrence derives from cases which would not otherwise be brought, not simply because of resource...

It is conventional wisdom that collusion is more likely the fewer firms there are in a market and the more symmetric they are. This is often theoretically justified in terms of a repeated non-cooperative game. Although that model fits more easily with tacit than overt collusion, the impression...

Previous empirical assessments of the effectiveness of structural merger remedies have focused mainly on the subsequent viability of the divested assets. Here, we take a different approach by examining how competitive are the market structures which result from the divestments. We employ a...

The purpose of this paper is to identify empirically the implicit structural model, especially the roles of size asymmetries and concentration, used by the European Commission to identify mergers with coordinated effects (i.e. collective dominance). Apart from its obvious policy-relevance, the...