درباره نقش سازمان صنعتی تجربی در سیاست رقابت

In this paper I consider the role of empirical industrial organization (IO) in competition policy. In particular, I consider the effect of the institutional setting in which competition policy is developed on the diffusion of ideas and techniques emerging from the empirical IO literature. In doing so my aims are two fold. First, I aim to understand the areas of competition policy most likely to provide fertile ground for future work, and those which are less likely to have an impact. And second, I hope to make a small step towards ensuring that the important potential synergies between competition policy and empirical IO are more fully developed — to the benefit of both communities and, more importantly, the public. This paper necessarily draws heavily on my experience in the UK, but many remarks may resonate more generally.

In very broad terms, the picture of the role of economics in competition policy is a happy one. And indeed, this paper will of course conclude that IO in general and empirical IO in particular are tremendously important for competition and regulatory investigations (see also Davis and Garces (2010)). That said, at the moment while theoretical IO is playing a central role in competition policy, elements of empirical IO in particular are arguably under-achieving in actually affecting both policy and practice in many competition and regulatory agencies across the world. It is interesting to consider the reasons that this may be the case and, if so, where best to focus efforts to (i) expand use of the available tools and (ii) develop new ones.1 By empirical IO, I will mean in particular–careful empirical analysis of individual cases–a type of analysis which is the current modus operandi for most, but not all, of the empirical IO literature. Broadly, competition policy as actually practiced ‘on the ground’ is collectively determined by the actions of people in at least five places: (i) By government and parliament developing and adopting legislation; (ii) through case selection within competition agencies; (iii) through guidance issued by competition agencies; (iv) by the staff and decision makers within agencies deciding individual cases, and subsequently (v) by the decisions of specialist tribunals and courts that make judgements about whether agencies have done their job properly. In what follows I will collect these disparate venues into two broad groups and discus each in turn. First, those competition policy structures that arch across cases and second those which relate to the way decisions within cases are made. A central point of this paper is that the institutional constraints associated with each of those arenas (i) differ, (ii) effect the likely impact of case-specific empirical work, and (iii) are important to consider when undertaking or valuing the likely contribution of academic work in affecting competition policy and practice.

Many papers in the academic literature on empirical industrial organization state that at least one part of the motivation for their research is to affect competition policy. In general the influence of industrial organization on competition policy is enormous — indeed difficult to overstate. However, the (admittedly largely anecdotal) evidence on the success of the diffusion of evidence and tools from the empirical IO literature appears to provide more of a mixed picture. In this paper I've attempted to consider why that might be the case and what might be done about it. Specifically, I've attempted to outline the ways in which competition law institutions provide an environment with important implications for the extent and manner in which insights generated by papers in the empirical industrial organization literature are likely to be absorbed. And, of course, to make some practical suggestions for approaches that may help overcome the barriers to entry for the empirical IO literature's products. There remains a great deal to do.