Leniency experiments: an evaluation of external validity

Yui Law (), Sinchit Lai () and Ning Liu ()
Additional contact information
Yui Law: City University of Hong Kong
Sinchit Lai: City University of Hong Kong
Ning Liu: City University of Hong Kong

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2025, vol. 59, issue 1, No 2, 19-76

Abstract: Abstract Integrating and cross-comparing the findings of existing leniency experiments, this paper highlights multiple important experimental phenomena related to the effectiveness of leniency. The information extracted from existing leniency experiments provides useful guidelines for policy-making. In addition, this paper shows that auxiliary experimental settings may subtly influence the experimental results. Importantly, this paper explains that external validity issues are not trivial for the inferences of leniency experiments. Overlooking these external validity issues may lead to underestimation or overestimation of the effectiveness of leniency. Thus, this paper suggests that the interpretation of leniency experiments’ findings and policy recommendations should be based on relevant prior knowledge from other fields, e.g., economics, law, and psychology, as well as the theoretical and empirical studies in the field of leniency. Moreover, future leniency experiments can further enrich the understanding of this topic if existing external validity issues are addressed.

Keywords: Competition law; Leniency policy; Economic experiment; Research method; External validity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D4 K21 L4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10657-025-09835-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:ejlwec:v:59:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s10657-025-09835-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10657

DOI: 10.1007/s10657-025-09835-1

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus, Giovanni B. Ramello and Alain Marciano

More articles in European Journal of Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().