Chillin'Competition

The Polish Competition Authority – UOKiK – has posted on its website a whole book entitled “Changes in Competition Policy Over the Last Two Decades“.

This book was written to celebrate the 20th anniversary of UOKiK. The list of authors is impressive.

The good thing about summer time:

• No classes
• No exams
• No conferences
• Less emails

Over the past days, I have managed to clean up my mailbox and, more importantly, to write a  new paper, which I just posted on ssrn. It deals with merger remedies in coordinated effects cases.

This is still work in progress. Comments welcome, as usual.

(Picture subject to copyrights: source here)

PS: re. picture – by now, most of you should have understood that I am a huge rock n’ roll fan.

A new book, with  follows a very novel perspective on the Commission’s decisional practice, has been published.

“European Commission Decisions on Competition: Economic Perspectives on Landmark Antitrust and Merger Cases” is now available from Cambridge University Press. This reference book offers a classification and analysis of all European Commission decisions adopted pursuant to European antitrust rule (i.e. Articles 101, 102 and 106 of the FEU Treaty) from the Treaty of Rome of 1957, up to and including 2009. It also includes a sample of landmark European merger cases. The decisions are organized according to the principal economic theory applied in the case. For each economic category, we describe in a fixed template format the seminal decision(s) that became a reference point for that type of (anti)competitive behavior. All subsequent decisions in which the same economic principle was applied are listed chronologically.

For more information and to order, click here

In his last paper, Dan Sokol (Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog) finds evidence that there was no significant reduction in merger enforcement under Bush. 

In addition to this, Dan provides citations to a relevant Simpsons episode, post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucault, and 80s’ rock band Wang-Chung along with the usual antitrust suspects in law and economics.

Below the abstract, and a link here to the paper.

ABSTRACT: This article provides a descriptive, analytical overview of the various institutions to better frame the larger institutional interrelations for a comparative institutional analysis. In the next Part it examines mergers as a case study of how one might apply antitrust institutional analysis across these different kinds and levels of antitrust institutions. The Article utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methods based on survey data of antitrust practitioners on merger issues to better understand institutional choice and the decision-making process. The surveys reveal results that run counter to the popular antitrust discourse about the level of merger enforcement under Bush. Slightly more than half of all practitioners surveyed found no change in merger enforcement under Bush in their own practice and the vast majority of the rest found a change in enforcement to be merely at the margins. The Article concludes with observations from the case study and appeals for more theoretical and empirical works in antitrust institutional analysis.

(Image possibly subject to copyrights: source here)

I recently peer-reviewed a paper for a competition law journal.

The paper was crap: a recycled and biased “expert” opinion, poorly translated from a non-English language to English, with a significant amount of considerations that were entirely off-topic (technical discussion of the regulatory framework for IPRs).  My assessment was negative, bad, tough.  I made loads of comments, supposing that the editors would forward them to the author, who in turn would try to implement and/or contest them. In brief, I expected to see a new version of the paper, or at least receive some explanation to the effect that my comments were not relevant, etc.  My experience is that this is how it works with professional journals.

Anyway, I was quite surprised to learn today, by myself, that the paper had been published. I have not yet seen it but I doubt that it differs much from the initial version. So I am pissed off: I spent a considerable time on this peer-review, and this was probably useless.

More importantly: European legal journals like to say that they now  implement peer-review procedures, but I believe that the practical implementation of such procedures remains far from perfect, and that politics still play a huge role in the publication process. It’s nothing as it seems (as Pearl Jam said in a great song).

(Image possibly subject to copyrights: source here)