How effective are remedies in merges cases? A European and national assessment

Michael Polemis ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Remedies form an essential tool of any enforcement action and need to be devised with great caution from National Competition Authorities (NCAs). If the remedy is ineffective, the enforcement action does not reach the desired objective and resources will have been wasted. If the remedy is disproportionate, the decision is put at risk in a possible subsequent appeal. Remedies either behavioural or structural imposed by competition authorities seek to eliminate unilateral or/and coordinated effects as a result of the merger and restore competition on the relevant market(s) to the status quo ante. Moreover, remedy packages have typically included extensive structural divestments to remove competition concerns. The scope of this paper is to examine various issues relating to the imposition of remedies in merger cases focusing on the gas and electricity sectors (commodity and capacity release programmes, customer release schemes, network related remedies). This paper relies on the energy sector with a view to developing general principles for imposing effective remedies in other sectors as well. Given the nature of competition in energy markets, particularly effective remedies are those that involve gas release programmes, the sale of price-setting generation plants, network assets, and controlling stakes in merging parties’ competitors.

Keywords: Merger remedies; competition; energy sector; Gas release programs; European Union (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G34 K21 L10 L40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-01-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ene, nep-ind and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/85180/1/MPRA_paper_85180.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How effective are remedies in merger cases? A European and national assessment (2018)
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:pra:mprapa:85180

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().