Competition for Competitiveness : The Politics of the Transformation of the EU Competition Regime

Overbeek, H.W. [Promotor]Nolke, A. [Promotor

Revisiting the European Competition Reform: The Toll of Private Self-Enforcement

Contains fulltext : 137365.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)The recent European competition law reform abolished the more than 40 year-old notification regime according to which companies routinely notified to the European Commission all kinds of envisaged commercial agreements and cooperative business practices other than mergers and acquisitions (e.g. production and R&D joint ventures, licensing and franchising contracts, marketing and sales agreements, information exchange and other collaborative activities with their competitors). A new system of private self-enforcement of European competition law will come in place, which hinges upon two dimensions: enhanced emphasis is given to private self-assessment and the facilitation of legal actions by private entities before the national and the European courts. The shift towards private enforcement reflects an incremental change of competition control. It represents a case of convergence towards the US competition law enforcement system. This paper puts the two dimensions of private self-enforcement in a context of a broader discursive shift in contemporary European economic governance and argues that the reliance on the "market intelligence" in spotting anti-competitive practices indicates a regulatory transformation from a clear-cut, formal and supervisory public control towards a more insecure and more laissez-faire market-based solution. Although it remains to be seen what future impacts the reform will cause, the paper somewhat tentatively contends that this is a rather risky endeavor with regard to regulatory stringency as it may stimulate a claimant's culture driven merely by profit motives. The ones to profit from private self-assessment and increased litigations are law companies providing advocacy services to other companies.23 p

Towards A Market-Based Approach: The Privatization and Micro-Economization of EU Antitrust Law Enforcement

Contains fulltext : 137340.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)The paper addresses the interface of the recent antitrust reform of the European Union (EU) and the ongoing transformation of the power relations between shareholders and management as one of the key aspects of corporate governance. From the mid-1990s onwards, the EU competition regime has undergone a series of reforms. The 2004 antitrust reform, generally referred to as the ‘Modernization’, constitutes the focal point of analysis. It fundamentally changes the way in which anticompetitive conduct such as cartels and other restrictive business practices are prosecuted in the EU. With the replacement of Regulation 17 with Regulation 1/2003, the long-standing centralized public ex ante market control model was abolished and a decentralized ex post private enforcement regime became prevalent. Together with the enhanced emphasis on neo-classical micro-economic theories and econometric modeling in the assessment of anticompetitive behavior, the paper argues that the new regime introduces a more market-based approach of antitrust enforcement, which in addition also heralds a more shareholder value orientated market economy. Under the new regime, the proactivity of market actors to litigate observed anti-competitive behaviour before the EU or national courts increasingly determines whether or not EU antitrust laws are enforced. The paper demonstrates that the enhanced possibilities to litigate in antitrust matters open up a windows of opportunity for shareholders to increase their voice options vis-à-vis the management and to redistribute economic power into their favour.38 p

The New EU Industrial Policy and Deepening Structural Asymmetries: Smart Specialisation not so Smart

Contains fulltext : 250917.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)In response to the 2008financial crisis and rising competitive pressures from emerging markets,EU industrial policy has made a major comeback. One of theflagship policies is Smart Speciali-sation, which is located at the intersection of industrial and cohesion policy, and which serves thetwin purpose of catalysing the transition of manufacturing sectors to innovative Industry 4.0-typetechnologies, as well as inducing social and territorial cohesion and upward economic conver-gence. Employing a critical political economy perspective that accounts for the interplay betweenstate regulation and capitalism’s general dynamic of uneven and combined development, the arti-cle argues that Smart Specialisation is unlikely to lead to the proclaimed and much-needed eco-nomic intra-EU convergence. Although individual Smart Specialisation projects undoubtedlycan lead to a technological upgrading, narrowing the gap between advanced high-tech regionsand rapidly de-industrializing regions, or regions locked into labour-intensive, low value-addedand less knowledge-intensive production, remains a pipedream.19 juni 202

Interference, Cooperation and Connectivity - A Degrees of Freedom Perspective

We explore the interplay between interference, cooperation and connectivity in heterogeneous wireless interference networks. Specifically, we consider a 4-user locally-connected interference network with pairwise clustered decoding and show that its degrees of freedom (DoF) are bounded above by 12/5. Interestingly, when compared to the corresponding fully connected setting which is known to have 8/3 DoF, the locally connected network is only missing interference-carrying links, but still has lower DoF, i.e., eliminating these interference-carrying links reduces the DoF. The 12/5 DoF outer bound is obtained through a novel approach that translates insights from interference alignment over linear vector spaces into corresponding sub-modularity relationships between entropy functions.Comment: Submitted to 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT