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Journal of Competition Law and Economics Advance Access originally published online on January 29, 2008
Journal of Competition Law and Economics 2008 4(1):89-113; doi:10.1093/joclec/nhm024
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

TRIGGERING INSPECTIONS EX OFFICIO: MOVING BEYOND A PASSIVE EU CARTEL POLICY

Hans W. Friederiszick * and Frank P. Maier-Rigaud **

The implementation of leniency programs is considered a success both at a EU Community level and in individual member states. The paper discusses the value of ex officio investigations for cartel detection in light of leniency and complaint-based cases. Are ex officio investigations still needed? Should a competition authority concentrate its scarce resources exclusively on the prosecution of leniency or complaint-based cases or follow a proactive market monitoring policy? It is argued that investigations triggered ex officio are an important complementary enforcement tool to the other passive instruments available to a competition authority. A bottom-up methodology for triggering inspections based on economic criteria is presented allowing for a more proactive cartel policy.

* European Commission, Directorate General Competition, Chief Economist Team, Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: friederiszick{at}esmt.org. Since October 2006, his new affiliation is the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT), Berlin. We thank Svend Albæk, Rainer Becker, Joe Harrington, Massimo Motta, Marc Pirrung, Lars-Hendrik Röller, Pierluigi Sabbattini, Andreas Seip, Maarten Pieter Schinkel, Daniel Wiesen, three anonymous referees, and participants at the ACLE Forensic Economics Conference in Amsterdam, the European Competition Network Chief Economist meeting, the 25th Conference on Political Economy in Saarbrücken, and our colleagues from DG Competition. The views expressed are those of the authors and not of the European Commission.

** European Commission, Directorate General Competition, Directorate A, Policy and Strategic Support, Brussels, Belgium; Department of Economics, University of Bonn and Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany. E-mail: maier-rigaud{at}microeconomics.de.


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