Ex post assessment of European competition enforcement:
Did agency intervention restore competition in the market?
Ex post analysis of competition law decisions is becoming a topic of central importance. Competition policy’s commitment to efficiency in decision-making, together with legitimate demands for accountability, has nurtured increased interest from agencies to learn from the past through retrospective case studies. Unfortunately, competition agencies often find it hard, in practice, to evaluate the benefits and costs of previous interventions in markets.
From a policy standpoint, retrospectives raise several hard questions: have past competition policy interventions or non-interventions delivered? Have competition remedies restored or safeguarded market competition? If decisional errors have been made, what can we learn from them? And more fundamentally, what are the costs of competition enforcement compared to the benefits it produces?
This year, the GCLC’s Annual Conference for 2021 will discuss the results of a research project that the GCLC ran in the past year on ex post assessment of competition enforcement in Europe. At this unprecedented event, economists, business scientists, legal practitioners, and enforcers will use the benefit of hindsight to review past competition cases.
The event will take place online over three consecutive Fridays.
29 January – 5 February – 12 February 2021
14:00-18:30 CET Hosted on Webex
