The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law

68 Pages Posted: 13 Mar 2019 Last revised: 4 Jul 2019

See all articles by Anu Bradford

Anu Bradford

Columbia Law School; Columbia University - Law School

Adam Chilton

University of Chicago - Law School

Katerina Linos

University of California, Berkeley - School of Law ; University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law

Alex Weaver

Linklaters

Date Written: July 2, 2019

Abstract

The world’s biggest consumer markets—the European Union and the United States—have adopted different approaches to regulating competition. This has not only put the EU and US at odds in high-profile investigations of anticompetitive conduct, but also made them race to spread their regulatory models. Using a novel dataset of competition statutes, we investigate this race to influence the world’s regulatory landscape and find that the EU’s competition laws have been more widely emulated than the US’s competition laws. We then argue that both “push” and “pull” factors explain the appeal of the EU’s competition regime: the EU actively promotes its model through preferential trade agreements and has an administrative template that is easy to emulate. As EU and US regulators offer competing regulatory models in domains as diverse as privacy, finance, and environmental protection, our study sheds light on how global regulatory races are fought and won.

Keywords: Competition Law, Antitrust Law, Antitrust, European Union, Diffusion, Comparative Law

Suggested Citation

Bradford, Anu and Bradford, Anu and Chilton, Adam and Linos, Katerina and Weaver, Alex, The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law (July 2, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3339626 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3339626

Anu Bradford

Columbia University - Law School ( email )

435 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10009

Columbia Law School ( email )

435 West 116th Street
New York, NY 10027
United States

Adam Chilton (Contact Author)

University of Chicago - Law School ( email )

1111 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.adamchilton.org

Katerina Linos

University of California, Berkeley - School of Law ( email )

488 Boalt Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-7200
United States

University of California, Berkeley - Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law

Boalt Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-7200
United States

Alex Weaver

Linklaters ( email )

United States

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