Brook, O. orcid.org/0000-0001-7636-3615 (2023) Do EU and U.K. Antitrust “Bite”?: A Hard Look at “Soft” Enforcement and Negotiated Penalty Settlements. The Antitrust Bulletin, 68 (3). pp. 477-518. ISSN 0003-603X
Abstract
EU and U.K. antitrust are contingent upon rigorous enforcement and the imposition of sanctions. Hard enforcement is key; antitrust loses its effect when it does not “bite.” Soft instruments (non-adversarial, informal) and negotiated penalty settlements may be used, but authorities are expected to exercise self-restraint. This article reveals that despite the prevalence of hard-enforcement rhetoric, the vast majority of actions taken by the European Commission (1958–2021) and German, Dutch, and U.K. antitrust authorities (2004–2021) were not fully adversarial. The hard-enforcement actions, moreover, were confined to limited practices and sectors. Despite the prominence of non-fully adversarial instruments in Europe, and in striking contrast to the United States, only limited attention was devoted to their existence and implications. Urging to take a hard look at soft enforcement and negotiated penalty settlements, the article systematically records the enforcement instruments and their particularities, questions their effectiveness, and calls to align enforcement theory to practice.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2023. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | antitrust; hard enforcement; soft enforcement; negotiated penalty settlements |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Law (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 18 Jul 2023 10:22 |
Last Modified: | 07 Dec 2023 12:26 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0003603x231180245 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:201636 |