Carmen Isabel Reyes García

Evaluating Antitrust Leniency Programs

This paper identifies and then quantifies econometrically the impact of leniency programs on the perception of the effectiveness of antitrust policies using country level panel data for a 10-year span. Leniency programs have been introduced gradually in antitrust legislation across the globe to fight more effectively against cartels. We use the dynamics of the diffusion of such policy innovation across countries and over time to evaluate the impact of the program. We find that leniency programs have had a significant impact on the perception among the business community of the effectiveness of each country‟s antitrust policy. Leniency programs have become weapons of mass dissuasion in the hands of antitrust enforcers against the more damaging forms of explicit collusion among rival firms in the market place.

Assessment of the online forum

In the last decade, not only the advances in educational investigation but also the reforms promoted in the European Space of Higher Education, have brought about a change in the concept of learning, and in consequence, in the evaluation. However, the evaluation is today a task which is still unfinished in the Spanish university, in which the greater part of the teachers evaluate practically exclusively through a final exam based of memorised questions (Zabalza, 2003; Bonson and Benito, 2005). This traditional model is more obvious in online teaching. In this study we propose the integration of this new model of evaluation in the e-learning Moodle Platform and we propose the online forum as a communication tool with wide possibilities for didactic innovation and for the assessment from an alternative approach. We also offer a proposal to assess the online forum via an instrument like the rubric.