Chillin'Competition

Concurrences and George Washinton Law School presented their Antitrust Writing Awards on Tuesday night in D.C.

The list of winners is available here.

Bill Kovacic was in charge of announcing the winners. We weren’t there, but we can imagine him saying something like: “And the  award to the best academic paper on unilateral conduct goes to…….. Nicolas Petit, for “Credit Rating Agencies, the Sovereign Debt Crisis and Competition Law“!l

Yep, Nicolas is the proud winner of the award to the best academic article on unilateral conduct. His piece was also the most publicly voted one (the readers of this blog probably have something to do with that, so thanks on his behalf).

I want to congratulate not only Nicolas, but also all other winners as well as all the authors of all the other articles that had been selected for the competition.

Moreover, we want to congratulate the organisers: Concurrences (in the person of Nicolas Charbit) and George Washinton Law School. The creation of these awards is a fantastic initiative; we hope that they’re here to stay.

A few non-politically correct comments now:

1: To a certain extent Nicolas deserves credit for this prize. Nonetheless, any impartial observer should rapidly realize that I -in my capacity as the manager of Nico’s brilliantly conceived campaign– am the one responsible for his victory.. 😉 We’ll ask a credit rating agency who deserves more credit  (wow, this is incredibly bad even for my standards…).

2: The picture illustrating one of our “campaign” posts was premonitory.

3: This must be the first time in a decade or so that a Frenchman wins any competition (except, certainly, for this one) 😉  In fair reciprocity (some background here), I -as a Spaniard- should write a piece hinting that Nicolas owes his victory to doping (which, by the way, was definetely the case since he finished it during a trip to Scotland; this is how his desk must have looked like).

4: How much sense does it make for a paper on “collective” dominance to be awarded the prize to the best article on “unilateral” conduct??   Just kiddin’ here: the core of the paper apparently deals with individual abuses of collective dominance, so it makes perfect sense.

5: You caught me: I just wrote “apparently”. I guess I’ll now have to read  Nicolas’ paper.

P.S. One suggestion for the organizers of the Writing Awards: since client alerts and articles published in newsletters are elegible for the prizes in the “Business” category, why not extend it to blog posts? We also need incentives to compete!