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The Agency Effectiveness Study explores a wide range of the daily concerns faced by competition agency heads and their staff, with an emphasis on the formal and informal ways in which they are addressed. Managing and operating a competition agency is very much a process of learning-by-doing. The aim of the study is, therefore, to capture and make available the know-how that competition agency officials accumulate during their service. In particular, it aims to provide a candid account of the practical challenges encountered and solved by heads of agencies and their staff as they navigate through changing legal, social, political, and organizational landscapes.As part of the study, current and former agency heads and competition law officials, of both young and more established agencies, were interviewed and asked for their views on a wide range of topics linked to agency effectiveness. A qualitative method was adopted to capture the knowledge and first-hand experience of competition officials. The data were collected through both face-to-face interviews and questionnaires with the aim of exploring practical, managerial, and structural challenges, which may influence an agency’s effectiveness. (Less) more...

(2011). How Does Your Competition Agency Measure Up? European Competition Journal: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 25-45.

In this case, the changes appear to reflect a policy choice that favors technology users at the expense of patent holders. Hugh M. Hollman (Baker Botts)

The October 2010 issue of the Antitrust Source features a series of articles by distinguished antitrust practitioners on the new horizontal merger guidelines. While the Source has published numerous articles on the proposed merger guidelines revisions, the symposium provided the first collection of essays on the 2010 Guidelines. The essays were not intended to be a comprehensive discourse but were purposely limited to one or two key points on which each author wanted to focus. There has been a general awareness in the antitrust community that an update to the seventeen-year-old Horizontal Merger Guidelines was appropriate, but it is likely that the close working relationship and similarity of views between the current chief economists at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice acted as the tipping point that led to the release of revised guidelines in 2010. more...

The Merger Regulatory Process as we know it has existed for thirty years. There have been marginal shifts (up and down) in enforcement intensity with changes in administrations and personnel, but there has been one constant: complaints about the burden of the Second Request process. Some of this is inevitable — prosecutors and potential defendants will rarely have identical perspectives. But there has been enough consensus on the flaws in the process that there have been a series of agency efforts to improve it. The problem has not been solved, and we believe a real solution will require a completely different approach to the problem. This article proposes such a new approach. more...