Law Commons^™

The design of mechanisms for the enforcement of rules regarding anticompetitive practices has been the subject of considerable controversy in both developed and developing countries. Public competition authorities have advantages in terms of scale economies and coordination of competing policy objectives. Private rights of action enhance the capacity of legal regimes to generate information and deter collusive agreements and exclusionary practices. Private enforcement also increases the transaction costs of regulatory capture. Given these differences, mixed regimes are likely to be superior to purely public or private arrangements. However, most national jurisdictions grant exclusive authority to public agencies and prosecutors. This …

Most developing and transition countries adopted statutes prohibiting anticompetitive agreements and abusive practices during the 1980's and 1990's. The effectiveness of these laws is nevertheless widely debated. This paper contributes to the literature by conducting an event study of the adoption of Russian competition laws in the early years of transition, the subsequent economic developments and the legislative reform process of 2002-2006. An examination of the substantive prohibitions and enforcement data reveals that Russian competition laws relied on complex standards and imposed weak constraints on anticompetitive practices. The more recent shift to simpler and more predictable per se prohibitions against …

The relationship between the design of competition laws and economic outcomes remains the subject of considerable controversy in both law and economics. Recent cross-national studies suggest that effective legal constraints against anticompetitive practices can enhance prospects for economic development by increasing the number of market participants and the quality of broader political and economic institutions. This paper explores the linkages between regulatory constraints against anticompetitive practices and the efficiency of market mechanisms by focusing on the experience in Poland between the collapse of central planning and regulatory harmonization pursuant to European Union accession. The analysis suggests that per se prohibitions …