The Global Dominance of European Competition Law Over American Antitrust Law

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 European Union and the United States 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 E.U. competition laws have been more widely emulated than the U.S. antitrust laws. We then argue that both “push” and “pull” factors explain the appeal of the E.U. competition regime: the European Union actively promotes its model through preferential trade agreements and has an administrative template that is easy to emulate. As E.U. and U.S. 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.