Competition authorities impose substantial penalties on firms engaging in illegal pricefixing. We examine how basing cartel fines on either revenue, profit, or price overcharge influences cartel and market prices, as well as cartel incidence and stability. In an infinitely repeated Bertrand...

Antitrust laws prohibit private firms to coordinate their market behavior, yet many types of interfirm cooperation are legal. Using laboratory experiments, we study spillovers from legal cooperation in one market to non-competitive prices in a different market. Our theoretical framework predicts...

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be a valuable competitive force in product and service markets. Yet AI may also pose competitive problems. I identify five big challenges that AI poses for competition. (1) Costly chips. (2) Private data. (3) Network effects. (4) Immobile talent. (5)...

Text mining and corpus linguistic methods are used to analyze 11,000 EU competition law decisions and judgments. This reveals a shift in the competition vocabulary from ordoliberalism in the 1970-80s to neoliberalism in the post-2000s. While the Commission has partly adopted a neoliberal...

In this paper, we comment on the debate about guidelines for Art. 102 TFEU in the face of the challenges brought by digital ecosystems and abuse of dominance in related markets. We take the perspective of dynamic competition economics and derive four recommendations for the future enforcement of...

Zentraler Bestandteil der Modernisierung der deutschen Missbrauchsaufsicht und eines der meist diskutierten neuen Instrumente des GWB-Digitalisierungsgesetzes ist § 19a GWB. Dieser beinhaltet ein neues Machtkriterium - die Designation von Unternehmen mit sog. „überragender...

Market concentration, alongside financialization and the climate crisis, is increasingly perceived as a major problem in contemporary capitalism. The fact that significant economic sectors are in the hands of a small number of powerful corporations - a phenomenon that is epitomized by Big Tech...

Citing corporate concentration and lax enforcement since the Reagan era, the Biden administration has declared a new era of aggressive antitrust prosecution, bringing antimonopoly actions against tech giants such as Meta, Google, and Amazon. But what’s so bad about monopoly or corporate...

Antitrust and market regulation, rather than being "flip sides of the same coin," populate a spectrum that ranges from a truly laissez faire economic system at one end to a command economy at the other. Competition policy and regulation have different strengths and will thus be preferred in...

Wage-fixing and no-poach agreements generally qualify as restrictions by object under Article 101(1) TFEU. While the pro-competitive effects of such agreements must be considered if demonstrated and significant, net efficiencies are uncertain and less restrictive means of achieving them are...

A bonus on the fine in response to the defendant running a corporate compliance program is superfluous because working leniency programs provide all the incentives necessary to implement efficient compliance. Others opposed to such a bonus argue that unreduced fines are sufficient to incentivize...

Kartellschadensersatzzahlungen erfordern eine angemessene Verzinsung, da der entstandene Schaden häufig lange zurückliegt. In Deutschland wird die Verzinsung dieser Ansprüche durch § 33a GWB in Verbindung mit §§ 288 und 289 BGB geregelt, wobei ein fixer Aufschlag von 5 % auf den...

Laut ökonomischer Forschung sind Preisgarantien geeignet, den Wettbewerb zwischen Unternehmen zu beschränken, da Konkurrenten dem auslobenden Unternehmen dadurch weniger Kunden abwerben können und entmutigt werden, dessen Preise zu unterbieten. Mit der „aufeinander abgestimmten...

Platform pricing may be connected to antitrust risks, which a company can face under excessive or predatory price scrutiny when the platform is recognized as dominant in the market. Since Federal Antitrust Service of Russia (FAS Russia) prefers price-cost comparison when studying excessive or...

Corporate sustainability due diligence (CSDD) is needed in order to achieve a transition towards a green economy and deliver the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, the Commission proposed the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) in 2019. In March 2024, the Council...

Following the judgment of the Court of Justice and especially the Opinion of the Advocate General in the CDC Hydrogen Peroxide case, arbitration agreements on disputes concerning damages for infringements of the competition rules of the TFEU have been interpreted as being contrary to the...

Concentrations with EU relevance, depending on their features, may fall under multiple legal regimes. EU/national merger control systems, antitrust rules, the Digital Markets Act, and the Foreign Subsidies Regulation impose (more or less) comprehensive jurisdictional, procedural and substantive...

The present research investigation examines the complex domain of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in order to analyse the crucial elements pertaining to antitrust implications and regulatory adherence. The study examines the economic and social consequences of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by...

The Anti-Monopoly Law serves as a competition policy to correct market order, providing a favorable institutional environment for corporate governance. We use China’s listed companies and a difference-in-difference strategy to examine the impact of the Anti-Monopoly Law on executives’ excess...

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,...