Competition Law Compliance - Can Hard Infringements of Competition Laws Be Prevented by Soft Measures

This talk presents the results of our survey on competition law compliance that was conducted between November 2013 and May 2014. In this survey, we collected data from 86 (mainly large) companies in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Many of the participating companies possess a front-runner role in the application of compliance measures and/or were found to have violated competition laws in the past.The study shows that 80% of these firms have implemented measures to identify and mitigate the risks of violating competition laws. The majority of these compliance-measures concentrate on risks in the legal sphere (e.g., insufficient awareness of the content and scope of competition laws). However, measures to identify and mitigate risks in the economic environment (e.g., entry into the market, competition by imports, more intense competition) are being used less frequently. The measures used for risk mitigation are mainly competition law trainings along with the provision of information material on the contents and scope of competition laws. This leaves scope for a fur-ther improvement of measures to detect cartelization risks at an early stage. This also applies to the design and communication of sanctions imposed by the firms on the offenders of competition laws. To date, these measures are often little systematic and poorly communicated.Our survey reveals a need for further research on at least two questions. First, what is the effect of compliance measures on a company’s reputation on input, output, labor and capital markets? Se-cond, can law-abiding behavior be stimulated by an appropriate Tone of the Top management? The latter question can possibly be analyzed using the framework provided by signaling theory. Both questions are intensely debated in practice. They might be worth being discussed more intensely in the academic literature, too.

Further information

Further information and download of the study (currently only in German, English version of the study will be available soon)