The role of legal standards and economic analysis in Competition Law enforcement: An empirical study on Turkiye

The aim of this study is to empirically measure and analyze the to what extent the economic analysis is used in the decisions taken by the Competition Board in Turkiye in terms of legal standards. To this end, the study employs the methodology developed by Katsoulacos et al. (2019). In this context, by classfying these decisions according to the types of infringement, the extent of economic analysis used in these decisions, whether there is a difference between the types of infringement in this sense, the course taken over time, and whether the results are meaningful in terms of the quality of implementation and judicial processes are analyzed. As a result of the analysis of the data for the period 1998-2017, it is observed that the scope of economic analysis varies between types of competition infringements and there has been an increase in the use of economic analysis especially in abuse of dominant position infringements. Although there is an unexpected increase in the use of economic analysis in cartel type infringements, it is observed that there has been a significant progress towards impact-based legal standards in vertical competition infringements.