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Frison-Roche, Marie-Anne --- "Efficient and/or Effective Enforcement" [2009] ELECD 203; in Drexl, Josef; Idot, Laurence; Monéger, Joël (eds), "Economic Theory and Competition Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009)

Book Title: Economic Theory and Competition Law

Editor(s): Drexl, Josef; Idot, Laurence; Monéger, Joël

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847206312

Section: Chapter 14

Section Title: Efficient and/or Effective Enforcement

Author(s): Frison-Roche, Marie-Anne

Number of pages: 7

Extract:

14. Efficient and/or effective
enforcement
Marie-Anne Frison-Roche*

1 INTRODUCTION

I would like to treat the question of efficient and effective enforcement of
competition law not only in technical terms, but also from a systemic per-
spective. This issue is eminently practical, because it concerns the con-
cretization of legal rules and decisions in real life. It also expresses a sort of
positivism, for which only an implemented rule is a real rule. But concrete
enforcement depends on the relation between economy and the law, and
between theory and practice.
Stated precisely, the question of the efficiency of enforcement is not only
a question of practice, such as the coordination between independent
authorities or classical states, but also a theoretical question, through a
theory of inducement, involving incentives to reveal anticompetitive behav-
iour for example, or through the conception of public versus private.
The practical necessity of obtaining the most effective implementation
of rules is common to all legal rules. Under this condition, it is economic
theory that gives specific light to this efficiency in competition law. As such,
economic theory transcends legal distinctions between public and private
enforcement and helps us to focus our attention on effective implementa-
tion more than on the adoption of rules itself. The `centre of gravity' is
moving away from the creation of legal rules (the centre of the legal system)
towards the concretization of legal rules and their effects on economic
behaviour (the centre of the economic system).
In this sense, ...