Swiss antitrust enforcement between 1995 and 2015
Creators: name: Kohler, Simon
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2017
Subjects: 343: Öffentliches Recht (CH), Sachen-, Finanz-, Steuer- und Wirtschaftsrecht

description: In 1995 the Cartel Act was passed by the regulators and with it the Competition Commission was set up. Since then the commission has investigated and enforced antitrust regulations for over 20 years. The commission is required by law to publish all of the decisions from the conducted investigations into economic misconduct. However, there does not exist an overview over the work done by them. Not even the commission itself has an overview of all their work.

This thesis provides such an overview. It includes all the work done by the commission, but focuses mainly on the investigations into economic misconduct. It further analysises the impact different factors have on the outcome of the investigations. There are a multitude of factors which could potentially have an impact on it. There is the report route of the investigation, the type of misconduct, the year in which the decisions was issued and the economic sector the corporation operates in. All of these are likely to have an impact in some way.

To analyse the work done by the commission during this time all the publicly available annual reports and issued decisions were collected and put into a data set. To complete the data set outside information was added to all the information from the Competition Commission. This thesis presents and further analysis the collected data.

Contrary to expectations the amount of issued decisions each year has not been rising. However, there has been both an upward trend in both the average time it takes the commission to complete an investigation and the amount of pages the published decision has. This could be explained by an increasing complexity. What has changed over the year is the type of the decision the investigation leads up to. In fact, it is the only factor which had a significant impact on the type of decision. For example, investigations after 2011 were far more likely to end in an amicable settlement than at the beginning of the Competition Commission. The analysis further shows the type of economic misconduct does not have an impact on the outcome of the investigation. Corporations who made illegal agreements are nearly as likely to be forced to change their behaviour as corporations who abuse their dominance. The investigations for both are also nearly equally likely to be discontinued. The report route of the case also does not make a significant difference in the outcome of the investigations. The same is true for the economic sector in which the corporation operates in. These results are quite surprising as the general expectation is that different types of misconduct should lead to different results.

The next step in evaluating the work done by the Competition Commission would be to compare the findings of this thesis to similar studies of other antitrust agencies around the world. These comparisons would show if there are similarities or differences between the agencies, which could potentially offer new insights into antitrust regulations.