Discretionary Cooperation and the Regulation of Internationalizing Business Activity: The EUÂ’s Promotion of International Competition Policy.

The linkage between trade and competition policy adds an important dimension to the new trade politics. As firms increasingly trade and invest internationally, the decisions of competition regulators can increasingly interact with the political decisions that govern trade policy. Competition regulators prefer promoting international convergence and cooperation as a means to avoid trade-related and other political interventions in their regulatory decisions. This paper employs a venue shopping model of policy change to identify those international organizations through which the European Union’s Directorate General Competition is most likely to seek cooperation and convergence in international competition policy. The Directorate General Competition shops among four different international organizations—United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Trade Organization and International Competition Network. Five different legal features frame and determine Directorate General Competition’s preference for selecting among these different venues, which, in turn, helps to explain the current and future dynamics of competition policy in the new trade politics. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]