“Economists are often mocked for their inability to reach common conclusions” (p. 251, footnote omitted). So begins the last chapter of this book's middle section on substantive cartel law. This sentence neatly sums up one of the major themes of this work: the lack of consensus on what a cartel is, when its actions should be considered illegal, what evidence is needed, and the best deterrents for cartel activity.
Research Handbook on Cartels, edited by Peter Whelan, provides an in-depth overview of a slice of competition law, the legal regulation of cartels. Divided into four well-organized parts, the book could easily be read in its entirety by someone interested in a deep dive into the law of cartels. Each chapter, though, also stands on its own and could be read piecemeal depending on the reader's interest.
Following a short introduction that nicely summarizes each chapter (and would be a good read for those seeking to determine which specific chapters are most relevant to their research), the book dives into the basics of cartel law in Part I, Fundamental Concepts. For a reader like me, with little familiarity with either cartel or competition law, the chapters in this section served as an easy-to-digest, essential overview of cartel law. Part I includes chapters on what a cartel is (Chapter 1), statistics on cartels, including damages and their prevalence (Chapter 2), a historic dive into legislation and policies used to counter anti-competitive behavior (Chapter 3), and a look at the morality of cartel conduct and why that matters (Chapter 4).
This overview yields nicely to Part II, Substantive Issues. In this section, things get interesting: we discover exactly how difficult it is to even define a cartel; the difficulty of determining, on a spectrum of legality, exactly where the line is between legal and illegal; and the trouble with finding evidence (since those participating in a cartel clearly seek to hide any evidence of their collusion). I was impressed with the organization of this section: again, while each chapter could stand alone, each chapter also builds on the previous one and includes increasingly complex issues within cartel regulation. For example, Chapter 5 could easily have fit into the Fundamental Concepts section, with its focus on what conduct should be considered inherently illegal and the difficulty of proving an entity acted other than independently. By the time you reach the last chapters in this section, the focus is on much narrower and complex issues, including how to assess information exchanges between competitors to determine whether it is collusion (Chapter 13), the normative justifications of banning any horizontal agreements between buyers (Chapter 14), and the general failure of governments when they permit cartels in a crisis (Chapter 15).
I ended Part II feeling as if cartel law was an amorphous blob of legal regulation, with little precision to hold on to; indeed, there are so many unresolved issues within cartel regulation. Part III, Procedural Issues, then, came as a relief: here are solid evidentiary practices, without the questioning nature of Part II. Part III does acknowledge the difficulties of procedure—Chapter 16, for example, speaks to how to prove an unlawful cartel existed while still moving through the procedural requirements, such as obtaining evidence and shifting the burdens of proof. Interestingly, much of Part III focuses on the aftermath of a finding of a cartel: Chapter 17 on leniency programs and what makes them successful; Chapter 18 on theories around fines and how to optimize them; Chapter 19 on recidivism and how to combat it; and Chapter 21 on how damages are typically calculated in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Only Chapter 20 (on the normative and pragmatic reasons to criminalize cartels) and Chapter 22 (on cross-border cartels and the application of game theory to a coordination tool for developing countries to use against them) break this mold.
For those familiar with cartel law, it is probably unsurprising that most of Parts I, II, and III concentrate on EU or US law. Part IV attempts to fill that gap (though it does still address EU and North American law), with sections on the approach to cartel regulation in various jurisdictions. These chapters all focus on multiple jurisdictions (for example, South America or the ASEAN nations), often with a comparative lens between the subject jurisdictions in their regulation and implementation of various aspects of cartel law. The one exception to this is the chapter on Hong Kong and mainland China, which instead examines the jurisdictions’ records on hub-and-spoke cartels and whether the US and EU experiences would be valuable to that record moving forward (spoiler: yes, they would).
I'd recommend this book for any academic library or any library whose patrons may be interested in competition law: it's a clear, deep review of the law of cartel enforcement around the world. Plus, the book is filled with interesting tidbits of information—for example, cartels and their regulation date back to Mesopotamia (p. 48), and the earliest-known punishment for cartel-related actions was for a grain-buying cartel in Athens in 326 BCE (pp. 241, 351). In short, this is a book that's well worth the purchase price.
