The ecology of competition law
01/10/2010 - 31/07/2012
Abstract
Despite heated debates about excessive rule burden and bureaucracy at the national and EU level, little quantitative work has been done to determine the exact amount of rule birth, change, and death events. This is where we seek to make our contribution.
In line with other ecological theories, such as organizational ecology, we posit that histories of formal rules have general statistical properties, which implies that they evolve in systematic ways. More specifically, we use a detailed counting method for the 1962-2008 time period in order to determine the exact amount of competition rules, both at the EU and at the national level (the Netherlands). This approach allows us to not only identify intrinsic dynamics within the same population of rules (density-dependence), but also to test for dynamics between different populations of rules (cross-density effects), such as the relationship between the EU and its member states.
Finally, we apply the same ecological approach to the enforcement of competition law, which in our view is also directly related to rule dynamics.
Researcher(s)
Principal investigator: van Witteloostuijn Arjen
Phd researcher: Wesley Kaufmann
Research team(s)
ACED/Management