CEG team publishes article on empirical evidence of overcharges from German cartels.

In an increasing number of cartel damages proceedings pending before German courts, reference to so-called meta studies of overcharges are made. These studies typically relate mostly to historic US cartels, and it was so far unclear whether any empirical findings transfer across to German domestic cartels.

CEG's Dr Juliane Bayer, Fabian Rinnen and Dr Fred Wandschneider have now published an article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Kartellrecht in which they analyse empirical evidence on overcharges using a sample of German cartels only. They find an average overcharge of around 14%, with a median of just under 5%. In addition, they investigated the influence of cartel characteristics on average overcharges in Germany. Their results confirm that the overcharge increases with increasing cartel duration or market coverage.

The full article is available at beck-online.beck.de