Many cartels are formed by individual managers of different firms, but not by firms as collectives. However, most of the literature in industrial economics neglects individuals' incentives to form cartels. Although oligopoly experiments reveal important insights on individuals acting as firms,...

Many cartels are formed by individual managers of different firms, but not by firms as collectives. However, most of the literature in industrial economics neglects individuals' incentives to form cartels. Although oligopoly experiments reveal important insights on individuals acting as firms,...

There is a raging debate within antitrust to determine how to best assess the conduct of digital platforms and tailor the enforcement of antitrust laws to the modern economy. The distinguishing features of digital platforms can make their analysis quite different from conventional, single-sided...

In February 2022, the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action presented its Competition Policy Agenda until 2025. Among other things, it aims to strengthen cartel prosecution by providing better protection for leniency witnesses and reforming the Cartel Damages Directive....

The December 2020 Commission's proposal for a Digital Markets Act (DMA) reached a compromised text with the Council and the Parliament on March 24, 2022. While the text that will impose obligations and prohibition rules on large online platforms acting as "gatekeepers" before any wrongdoing...

Business strategy focuses on finding ways for a firm to approach the “monopoly profit,” while competition law is about trying to stop firms from doing this. Building on this tension, classic strategic management theory may at times lead companies to select strategies that raise antitrust...

The digitisation of existing business models and the new way of doing business of digital platforms pose new challenges both to the performance of companies in the market and to the lives of consumers and users. The dominant digital companies are all American (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and...

The Global Antitrust Institute (“GAI”) respectfully submits this Comment to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) in connection with their Request for Information on Merger Enforcement (“Merger RFI”). This comment addresses the questions...

On October 20, 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) jointly issued important new guidance that shifts the DOJ’s policy regarding agreements relating to the hiring and compensation of employees, announcing that the DOJ intends to...

Despite the rationale and the legal basis of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European legal framework risks to become more fragmented in the post-DMA scenario because of overlaps with competition law. The paper provides an analytical overview of the hypotheses in which the dual application of...

Technological innovation is changing private markets around the world. New advances in digital technology have created new opportunities for subtle and evasive forms of anticompetitive behavior by private firms. But some of these same technological advances could also help antitrust regulators...

As of late, there has been a concerted push in the Biden administration, backed by prominent academics, to expand the application of antitrust law against major employers who exercise monopsony power that reduces aggregate demand and thus leaves too many workers on the sidelines. The effort...

For more than a century, courts and scholars have searched without success for a general definition of monopolization. Some proposals rely on elusive ciphers like “predatory conduct” or “competition on the merits”; others depend on nebulous or impractical balancing tests; others make...

Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anticompetitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise escape scrutiny, creating disincentives for managers to divulge transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First,...

Private enforcement of competition law in Germany and the Netherlands is booming. A surge in cartel damages actions has led to a flurry of judicial activity, while claim vehicles and claim funders continue to bring and fund new cases. At the same time, both jurisdictions also face significant...

We lay out a roadmap for how the legislator could create a framework of “sustainability corridors” that would allow to rely on the ancillary restraints doctrine to make antitrust law more accommodating of sustainability considerations. We show how this avoids the pitfalls of a multi-goals...

Antitrust laws in the United States, and competition rules in Europe, are usually set out in statutes of general applicability, written in broad, almost constitutional form. This is a “one size fits all” statutory style. There is another possible style of antitrust, which we call “bespoke...

This article analyzes the meaning and role of formalism in competition law. Drawing on general legal theory and philosophy, this article conceives of formalism as decision-making constrained by rules, whereby rules exclude considerations from the decision-making process. It analyzes the degree...

Digital platforms such as Amazon Marketplace or Google Search are commercial and political actors. They have taken center-stage as new spaces for exchange. They facilitate digitally networked interactions and transactions between different customer groups through algorithms, data, and other...

This Article advances a novel theoretical model for assessing policy interventions against Facebook. As prosecutors barrel forward against digital platforms, soon it will fall upon courts and, eventually, regulators to devise remedies. We argue that any sensible solution must include...

This paper examines the effect of firms' lobbying activities on penalties received from public competition authorities. For an average sanctioned firm, our model indicates that one additional dollar in lobbying yields to a decrease in cartel sanction of 3.12 dollars. We also observe that cartel...

Notwithstanding vigorous regulatory action against cartels in Australia and abroad, and the proliferation of antitrust class actions in North America, cartel class actions in Australia have been rare. The cartel class actions brought in Australia to date have faced significant challenges. These...

The debate about the economic power of large tech firms has led to the insight that due to the key role of personal data on large digital platforms competition and privacy issues are deeply intertwined. This leads also to a complex relationship between competition law and data protection (or...

Recent studies have proven that pricing algorithms can autonomously learn to coordinate prices, and set them at supra-competitive levels. The growing use of such algorithms mandates the creation of solutions that limit the negative welfare effects of algorithmic coordination. Unfortunately, to...

Complexity science is widely used across the policy spectrum but not in antitrust. This is unfortunate. Complexity science enables a rich understanding of competition beyond the simplistic descriptions of markets and firms proposed by neoclassical models and their contemporary neo-Brandeisian...

Compelled interoperability can be a useful remedy for dominant firms, including large digital platforms, who violate the antitrust laws. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so...

We consider the effect of passive common ownership on the efficacy of leniency programs to disrupt and deter cartels. Besides reducing deterrence, passive common ownership restrains the incentives of firms to come forward and denounce the cartel and therefore further favors collusion

After decades of disuse, antitrust is back. Renewing the United States’ longstanding distrust of concentrated economic power, antimonopoly scholars have documented widespread harms of corporate “bigness” and inspired policy initiatives to deconcentrate the U.S. economy. To date, however,...

This study analysis the implementation of the cartel leniency program by the Competition Commission of India using comprehensive data and finds a distinct lack of a ‘race’ to the agency. We specifically focus on why prima facie findings have not resulted in a ‘shock’ to expected returns...

This report written for the German consumer association vzbv (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband) analyzes the relationship between data protection law and competition law for fostering synergies and mitigating conflicts between both legal regimes, especially with regard to the huge economic...

The debate surrounding ‘big tech’ and antitrust has dominated public policy discourses over the past few years in many parts of the world. Noteworthy is that several countries and regions, including China, the European Union, and the United States, have launched investigations into the...

The effects of monopoly power or mergers on incentives to innovate are important issues for antitrust enforcement, but they receive relatively little attention in litigated cases compared to the analysis of predicted effects on prices. This paper reviews what is known about the relationship...

Traditionally, SDO-based open standardisation and open source standards have been used in different sectors: the (mostly) hardware-based telecommunications industry and the software-based IT industry, respectively. However, the increasing interdependencies within the ICT sector - notably those...

There has been calls from various organizations and key policy makers arguing that, countries must adopt effective trade policies and measures that should seek to maintain the trade during the COVID-19 pandemic. So what is the way forward for Africa? This paper briefly discusses the role...

The terms of antitrust statutes – monopoly, competition, unfair methods of competition, conspiracy in restraint of trade – are inherently vague and not self-defining. The legislative histories of the Sherman, Clayton, Federal Trade Commission and Celler-Kefauver Acts are riddled with...

Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. We investigate the political causes of this decline by looking at who made the crucial decisions and how strong a popular mandate they had to do so. Using a novel framework to understand the determinants of regulatory and...

The important field of antitrust and labor has gone through a profound change in orientation. For the great bulk of its history labor has been viewed as a competitive threat, and the debate over antitrust and labor was framed around whether there should be a labor “immunity” from the...

This reply briefly considers when false advertising can give rise to antitrust liability. The biggest difference between tort and antitrust liability is that the latter requires harm to the market, which is critically dependent on actual consumer response. As a result, the biggest hurdle a...

In the 21st century, voter choice and the broader political debate are within the reach of those that can access and channel the vast streams of user data that are generated online. The role of personal user data in digital markets, as well as the use that digital platforms make of that data in...

In his article, The Application of Antitrust Law to Labor Markets—Then and Now, Richard Epstein argues that rather than urge courts and regulators to apply antitrust law to labor markets, reformers who care about labor market competition should try to constrain unions. In this reply, I argue...

The DOJ and FTC monopolization cases against Google and Facebook, respectively, represent the most important federal non-merger antitrust initiatives since (at least) the 1990s. As in any monopolization case, market delineation will be a central feature of both cases – as it was in the du Pont...

The conversation around and study of the use of algorithms in pricing and other competitively sensitive decisions remains vibrant and is increasingly well-informed. Early theoretical work paved the way for government studies and more recently – and most interestingly – experimental and...

Though an acquisition of a minority non-controlling shareholding in a competitor falls outside the scope of the EU merger control provision, the effects on competition of such transactions can be nevertheless vetted on the ground of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU. This approach has been recently...

Competition law and enforcement are experiencing something of an awaking in the last decade. Central to the renewed interest in the role of competition law was the question of what objective it was designed to achieve. It is impossible to decide if competition law is the appropriate tool to...

This dissertation examines how antitrust and financial regulation can coexist in the financial sector without putting stability at risk. It focuses on the United States given their more federalised financial system and federal history, although its findings can be applicable to any country.It...

The Sherman Act establishes free competition as the rule governing interstate trade. Banning private restraints cannot ensure that competitive markets allocate the nation’s resources. State laws can pose identical threats to free markets, posing an obstacle to achieving Congress’s goal to...