The European Commission wants to know: How Effective is your Antitrust Regulator?
Feel like taking a survey about the effectiveness of your antitrust regulator of choice? Head over to Lear, which is conducting a survey as
part of a study on the effectiveness of competition law that the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission has commissioned … The survey contains a number of questions on the enforcement of competition legislation in the jurisdiction where you practice and on your perception about its effectiveness. It takes less than 15 minutes to reply to the whole questionnaire.Some of the questions make good sense, e.g., degree of independence of antitrust enforcement agencies from the executive. (I wonder if US respondents should submit an average score?) Others are so speculative that I doubt their usefulness. For example:
Suppose that a firm does participate in a hard-core cartel. What is, in your opinion, the probability that this infringement is detected (through an own-initiative investigation, a complaint or a self-report by a whistleblower) and a formal investigation on it is opened? We are only interested in the probability of an infringement being detected and investigated, independently of the result of the investigation (i.e. whether the firm is convicted or acquitted).If the point is to ascertain the perception of probability of detection, then that’s fine, I guess. But from the description of what the survey wants to accomplish I got the impression that the goal is measuring the effectiveness of enforcement, not the effectiveness of making enforcement appear effective. In any event, surveys are fun, so head over to Leaf and make your voice heard.0% to 5%, 5% to 10%, 10% to 20%, … above 80%; Do not know
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July 11th, 2007 at 11:35 am
I am one of the authors of the survey and so I want to thank you for spreading this news. I just want to add that indeed we are interested in the perception of experienced antitrust lawyers and economists and in ascertaing how this perception varied over time. This is so because economic theory posits that firm are deterred from undertaking unlawful conducts if the expected sanction is above the expected gain from the illegal behavior. Since the expected sanction depends on the perceived probability of being detected, we want to get information on this perception. In any case we are not going to draw firm conclusions only on the data we will collect through the questionnaire, as the survey is just part of a much wider exercise. Finally, just to provide all the relevant information to the readers, we have a questionnaire for the competition lawyers, that can be reached through the link you provide, and one for the competition economists that can be reached through the following url: http://www.learlab.it/surveyec.htm.
Thanks again.
Paolo