Marie-Laure Allain

Are Cartel Fines Optimal? Theory and Evidence from the European Union

Deterring the formation or continuation of cartels is a major objective of antitrust policy. We develop a dynamic framework to characterize the compensation and deterrence properties of fines, based on the fact that cartel stability depends on the ability to prevent deviation, which itself depends in part on fines imposed in case of detection and conviction. We show that the proper consideration of cartel dynamics plays a major role in determining optimal deterrent fines. Our results suggest that fines imposed by the European Commission in recent years meet the deterrence objective in a significant number of cases.

Competition and the Efficiency of Markets for Technology

The sale of R&D projects through licensing facilitates the division of labor between research and development activities. This vertical specialization can improve the overall efficiency of the innovative process. However, these gains depend on the timing of the sale: the buyer of an R&D project should assume development at the stage at which he has an efficiency advantage. We show that in an environment where the seller is overconfident about the value of the project, she may delay the sale to the more efficient firm in order to provide verifiable information about its quality, though this delay implies higher total development costs for the project. We obtain a condition for the equilibrium timing of licensing and examine how factors such as the intensity of competition between potential buyers influence it. We show that a wide array of different explanations, based on differences in information, beliefs or risk profiles, lead to the same qualitative results. We present empirical evidence from pharmaceutical licensing contracts that is consistent with our theoretical predictions.

Concentration horizontale et relations verticales

This paper analyzes the effects of horizontal mergers in vertically related industries. In a successive oligopoly model with an intermediate market, we show that horizontal mergers creating size effects are relatively more profitable downstream than upstream. Furthermore, concentration in an industry reduces the incentives to merge in the vertically related industries. These results hold in a merger game endogenising the merger process.

Music Variety and Retail Concentration

In this paper, we examine the impact of horizontal and vertical market structure on product variety. We consider a market for horizontally differentiated products in which the cost of launching a new product is fixed and spread between the manufacturing and the retail industries. While this framework can be applied to a large number of industries we focus on music variety. We show that a vertically intergrated firm offers a wider variety of products than a chain of monopolies. If the cost of launching a new product is equally shared among the vertical structure or mostly supported by upstream firms, retail competition partially restores the incentives to innovate of the vertical structure. Yet when the cost of launching a new product is mostly supported by the retail sector, downstream competition leads to even more innovation than vertical integration.