Essays in competition economics and the enforcement of competition policy

Abstract

Economists have been involved a lot in recent years in considering issues of enforcement of Competition law and how enforcement can become more effective, such as legal standards, substantive standards, penalties etc. This dissertation, contributes to the above by examining two important dimensions of the enforcement of Competition law: (i) fines and (ii) the requirement of extant market power in forming a presumption that unilateral firm actions or mergers may lead to social harm. Particularly, we study some key issues concerning the calculation of optimal fines by Competition and Regulatory Authorities (Chapter 2), we introduce a new methodology for setting fines (Chapter 3) and we examine the effects of exclusion in abuse of dominance cases with product differentiation and how they depend on the source of market power (Chapter 4). At the end of each chapter we give the conclusions relating to each of the main essays.