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Competition enforcement authorities use settlements as a tool to ensure compliance with antitrust law. Companies can make commitments to remedy breaches, ensuring that they avoid litigation and potential fines and reputational damage. The author of this highly original and innovative book shows that, rather than fines or arguing principles of competition law in litigation, antitrust settlements (namely U.S. consent decrees and EU commitment decisions) hold the key to globally effective enforcement, particularly in the digital and blockchain era. Antitrust law does not necessarily need to be abolished, but rather should be fully exploited as an economic regulation led by antitrust settlements. In supporting her thesis, the author examines such elements of competition enforcement as the following: drawbacks of allowing the courts to regulate markets; whether antitrust settlements sacrifice antitrust deterrence; how settlements rapidly and surgically regulate markets; comparative analysis between U.S. consent decrees and EU commitment decisions; economic analysis on the adoption of antitrust settlements in both the U.S. and EU markets from 2013 to 2018; fundamental role of antitrust settlements in regulating the current digital markets; and comprehensive description on how to use antitrust settlements to regulate the data industry. With its thorough guidance on U.S. consent decrees and EU commitment decisions from their functioning to their characteristics and procedure—and its extensive treatment of the main antitrust remedies available and used in enforcing of antitrust law in both the U.S. and EU—the book provides both an economic and a legal analysis of the functioning and the scope of antitrust settlements. It assesses the influence of decisions on companies'behavior and agencies'practice, using economic analysis to show the procompetitive or anticompetitive effects of remedies, with special attention to digital markets. Because markets have become so dynamic and unpredictable that is difficult to preserve efficiency, the author says, there is a little room for law—economic regulation is a better fit. This book is a springboard to further investigate how a simple antitrust enforcement tool, having turned competition law into an economic regulation policy, can drive our economy, leading both the antitrust and regulatory interventions in tackling today's market challenges.

Die Arbeit ist eine rechtsvergleichende und rechtsökonomische Untersuchung des Wettbewerbs der Gesellschaftsrechte in den USA und Europa. Dabei wird der Frage nachgegangen, welche Rolle hybride Rechtsformen und Kombinationen von Gesellschaftsformen im institutionellen Wettbewerb spielen. Der erste Teil führt wettbewerbstheoretische und rechtsökonomische Grundlagen einerseits mit den Erkenntnissen zum Gesellschaftskollisionsrecht im Anwendungsbereich der Niederlassungsfreiheit und andererseits dem Voranschreiten europäischer Rechtsvereinheitlichung zusammen. Aus dieser Gesamtschau und den Erkenntnissen aus dem US-amerikanischen regulatory competition werden die Eckpunkte einer Wettbewerbsordnung für den Wettbewerb der Gesellschaftsrechte in Europa abgeleitet. Im zweiten Teil werden in einer rechtsvergleichenden Untersuchung in den USA, Deutschland, England, Italien und der Schweiz Wettbewerbsaktivitäten in Bezug auf hybride Rechtsformen nachgewiesen und in den Kontext evolutorischer Rechtsentwicklung eingeordnet. Dabei wird die Entwicklung von kautelarjuristischen hin zu legislativen Kombinationen aus Personen- und Kapitalgesellschaftsrecht nachgezeichnet. Anhand der Limited & Co. KG werden schließlich Wege zur konsistenten Verknüpfung der beiden Gesellschaftsstatute aufgezeigt, allgemeine Prinzipien zur Institutionalisierung grenzüberschreitender Typenvermischungen entwickelt und ihre Bedeutung für die Substitutionserwägungen der Marktakteure dargestellt.

Competition Policy in the European Union provides a comprehensive introduction to the European Union's policies on restrictive practices, mergers monopolies and state aid. The authors offer a wide ranging analysis of the evolution, operation and regulation of one of the EU's most important policies in a clear and accessible format.

This comprehensive book contains case studies on the evolution of competition policy, with an emphasis on merger policy, for seven major US industries that have experienced substantial deregulation in the past forty years - electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railroads, airlines, hospitals and banking. Also included is a comparison of the EU's experience in attempting to bring about competition in the energy, finance, and airline industries. The contributors to the volume, each a recognized expert on the industry examined, explore the positive and negative implications of the substitution of market-oriented processes for historic patterns of command and control regulation. The chapters reveal clear similarities in the economic, legal and public policy issues that have arisen following deregulation of these economic sectors. Together they provide a good basis to discern the consistency of the problems and the relative success of differing responses to these issues over a range of industries going through similar transformation. While taking a basically positive view of the movement away from direct regulation, the contributors identify a number of continuing problems with achieving workable competition in these industries. The thorough analyses presented here will be of great value to law, economics, and political science researchers interested in deregulation, economic consultants advising government agencies or private parties, attorneys who focus on deregulated industries, policy planners at the agencies overseeing these industries, and students in advanced seminars on economic regulation.