Google and Apple’s smartphone and tablet ‘app’ stores are facing significant antitrust scrutiny in Europe, culminating in enforcement action by the European Commission and specific obligations in the new EU Digital Markets Act. In a field previously dominated by US law and jurisprudence,...

This paper investigates the relationship between democracy and antitrust policy. Strong antitrust policies advance the economic and political interests of most citizens, making their adoption more likely in institutional settings that weigh the interests of consumers. We examine the empirical...

Remedies often get overlooked in discussions of antitrust litigation, treated almost as an afterthought. When remedies have been part of the antitrust debate the focus has often been on an after-the-fact assessment of their effectiveness, or on the general question whether there should be a...

There is widespread concern that dominant platforms may be undermining competition by discriminating against rivals in adjacent markets, such as by refusing to let rival sellers use their platforms or by engaging in “self-preferencing.” Such acts fall within a category of unilateral conduct...

The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are considering changes to the Horizontal and Vertical Merger Guidelines and have asked whether the current guidelines “underemphasize or neglect … potential competition.” Whether potential competition is underemphasized in the merger...

Two recent papers by prominent antitrust scholars argue that a revived antitrust movement can help reverse the dramatic rise in economic inequality and the erosion of political democracy in the United States. Both papers rely on the legislative history of the key antitrust statutes to support...

The new competition law introduced the principle of ‘competitive neutrality’ by bringing ‘state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) under the purview of competition law regulation by virtue of defining ‘enterprise’ to include government departments engaged in economic activity.This paper seek...

This paper examines the effect of firms’ lobbying activities on penalties received from public competition authorities. We show that lobbying expenditures are negatively associated with the amount of the cartel sanction, within cartel. Our estimates also report that cartel sanctions are more...

In 1985, Italian policymakers enacted a law to favour the start-up and consolidation of worker takeovers to preserve employment levels of distressed companies. Law 49/1985, also known as the Marcora Act, provides worker and social cooperatives with financial resources to promote and consolidate...

Recent literature has made a strong case for why sustainability considerations should play a larger role in competition law. Competition authorities’ rulemaking has already followed suit in certain instances. At the same time, this development encounters critique which deserves to be taken...

The DMA is unlikely to significantly change abuse of dominance enforcement by the European Commission and by NCAs since the vast majority of abuse of dominance cases do not concern gatekeepers of core platform services and, even some cases that do, do not concern the obligations and prohibitions...

We examine how the Mapai-Right Liberal rift shaped Israel's first Antitrust Law (1959). We document the protracted political debate regarding the proposed Law, which lasted from March 1950 until August 1959. While Mapai feared that the private sector would collude against consumer interests, the...

This research uses event study methodology applied to stock market data to measure the impact of competition law enforcement on share values. It addresses the gap in knowledge of how the impact of law enforcement can be measured and quality of present law evaluated. To address this gap also...

Enforcement of competition/antitrust laws regarding the exercise of market power in respect of upstream markets (monopsony/oligopsony power) has been inconsistent in both Canada and the United States. This paper provides an overview of the competition/antitrust laws in Canada and the United...

A crucial area of complementarity between competition and data protection law regimes is ensuring greater data mobility through data portability, interoperability, and open data standards in digital markets. The paper discusses how antitrust agencies would evaluate dominant platforms’...

The European Commission is charged with implementing the Digital Markets Act (DMA) which will impose a list of 22 do and don't to Big Tech platforms in March 2024. Based on economic and legal reasoning, this paper asks how the Commission can fulfil this challenging task effectively. The paper...

China's revised Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) went into effect in August 2022. In November, the Supreme People's Court (SPC) requested comments on its draft provisions for applying the AML in civil disputes. The Global Antitrust Institute's comment discusses the importance of the AML's newly expressed...

The U.S. federal government has brought major antitrust cases against Microsoft and Google. Regulators likely don’t expect to win either case outright, but the government doesn’t need to win these cases for them to have an impact. For one, an aggressive litigation strategy can provide a...

This article examines the interweaving borders between patent law and competition law. Despite the existence of certain statutory provisions that address the interface, it is a little examined area in New Zealand. The article attempts to elucidate the scope of the two intellectual property...

Currently, most jurisdictions around the globe provide victims of cartels a full right of action. However, a few jurisdictions do not provide any right of action to victims (e.g., Pakistan and Sri Lanka), while a few others merely provide victims a follow-on but not standalone right of action...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the game industry will increase by around 25% in 2023. Consolidation transactions between competing or vertically related companies, mainly when affecting consumers with inferior bargaining power, may raise concerns by the antitrust authorities. These...

The value of sales of an undertaking infringing antitrust law is a key determinant of the size of the fine levied by a competition authority. European competition authorities rely only on the turnover the undertaking receives from the products in relation to which the infringing conduct...

Observers fear that large corporations have amassed too much political power. The central fact that animates this concern is growing economic concentration—the rise in the market share of a small number of top firms. These firms are thought to use their enhanced economic power to capture the...

An increasing number of research, especially in law, are pointing out the difficulties of the neoclassical paradigm in studying the economy of digital platforms. Some of them propose to shift from the neoclassical paradigm to a complexity paradigm, especially to deal with antitrust issues....

German competition law has been witnessing a long-standing discussion on how and to what extent non-economic goals can and should play a role in the application of the German Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB). Recently, this discussion has centered on sustainability as a partly...

This study examines whether antitrust risk affects firms’ disclosure of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Due to regulatory exemptions, deals that fall below a size threshold escape formal antitrust scrutiny at the time of the merger. These “non-reported” deals can have important...

This is a time of passionate debate on the fundamental goals of competition law. Should there be a single overarching goal for all of competition law and policy? Should that goal be framed in purely economic terms? Should antitrust focus on protecting the competitive process, preventing unfair...

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) released its Digital Platform Services Inquiry, Interim Report No. 5 (Regulatory Reform) in September 2022. In December 2022, the Australian Treasury requested comments on the report. The ACCC Report recommends, inter alia, several...

Over the past three decades, antitrust laws have proliferated across the globe. International institutions and governments have promoted antitrust policy as an important regulatory tool to enhance economic performance. At the same time, we have scant empirical evidence on whether these policies...

The paper offers a reasoned and up-to-date reconstruction of the competition law enforcement system in the EU. It aims to explain what the architecture of competition law enforcement in the EU is, what the main achievements of the system are, as well as the challenges still threatening...

In McDonald v. Johnson & Johnson,the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit concluded that the plaintiffs had voluntarily withdrawn from competition in the pain control market and thus were not within the class of persons entitled to sue for treble damages. The plaintiffs, however, did not...

China watchers have decried the emergence of the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (“CIPS”) as a turning point in the move to dethrone the U.S. dollar. This Article situates CIPS, which clears and settles Chinese renminbi transactions, with other financial market infrastructures, drawing...

Recent outcry for antitrust reform argues that U.S. markets have become more concentrated, that large firms’ profit margins have increased, and that part of these changes may be attributed to lax antitrust enforcement since the 1960s. While each of these arguments is part of an intense...

This study examines how antitrust law adoptions affect horizontal merger and acquisition (M&A) outcomes. Using the staggered introduction of competition laws in 20 countries, we find antitrust regulation decreases acquirers’ five-day cumulative abnormal returns surrounding horizontal merger...

The United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and three overlapping groups of states have filed federal antitrust cases alleging Google has monopolized internet search, search advertising, internet advertising technologies, and app distribution on Android phones. In this Article, we focus...

The regulation of digital platforms is frequently framed as a legal and institutional trade-off. Should policy makers “regulate” or should they “break-up” Big Tech? Should they decentralize digital power or should they transform companies like Google into accountable bottlenecks? These...

This special issue marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of a leniency program for antitrust in the EU and contains five original papers: Each paper examines the effects of design parameters of leniency programs on their performance. Before introducing each contribution separately, we...

We evaluate the impact of the Washington State Attorney General's enforcement campaign against employee no-poaching clauses in franchising contracts, which unfolded from 2018 through early 2020. Implementing a staggered difference-in-differences research design using Burning Glass Technologies...

Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die im Energiesektor erfolgten Ministererlaubnisse vor dem Hintergrund der Betrachtung der Gemeinwohlbegründung „Energieversorgungssicherheit in Deutschland“. Anhand der vertieften Untersuchung des Falles E.ON/Ruhrgas als zuletzt ministererlaubter Fusion...