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The paper "Essentialities concerning the competition policy in the European Union, the 2012-2016 period" presents the decisions adopted at European Union level in relation to the breech of the competition rules by the Member States. In the first part of the paper, I drew a parallel between the state aids granted at EU level for the banking system, deeply affected by the economic crisis, and the aids granted for supporting other sectors. Afterwards, I made a brief presentation of the main anti-competitive and of the decisions related to them in the analysed period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulatory scholars have increasingly observed that it is not only public regulatory agencies and official enforcement action that motivate and enforce businesses' compliance with the law; in many situations, certain third parties may have greater capacity and power to motivate and enforce compliance with the law than do official regulatory agencies. This paper examines the extent to which businesses' worries about, and perceptions of pressure from, various third parties influence their internal compliance management activities and moral commitment in relation to complying with the objectives of competition and consumer protection law. Using data from a survey of 999 large Australian businesses, we find that businesses worry a lot about the reactions of a range of third parties including customers, shareholders, employees, and business partners to non-compliance. We find little evidence that these worries have much impact on what businesses actually do. However, perceptions of risk of complaints do influence what they do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs agent-based simulation to study energy market performance and, in particular, capacity withholding and the emergence of tacit collusion among the market participants. The energy market is formulated as a repeated game, where each stage game corresponds to an hourly energy auction. Each hourly energy auction is cleared using locational marginal pricing. Generators are modeled as adaptive agents capable of learning through the interaction with their environment, following a reinforcement learning algorithm. The SA-Q-learning algorithm, a modified version of the popular Q-Learning, is used. Test results on a two-node power system with two and eight competing generator-agents, demonstrate the development of tacit collusion among generators even under competitive conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that the American political tradition and the antitrust laws make competitive free enterprise both a norm in practice and an ideal of national policy. Those who favor this policy do so on various grounds. They believe that rivalry among competing sellers will lead to improvement of product and reduced prices. The downward pressure on selling prices will also compel a striving for increased efficiency and reduced costs. It is the purpose of this paper to review the work of these administrative agencies and the courts in formulating national economic policy in this area. The central and recurrent problem will be the relative weight to be accorded to the policy of maintaining competition in an industry which by hypothesis is to be governed by competition only to a limited extent.