Strengthening the enforcement of competition law represents an aim of recent legislative reforms and reform efforts at the European and EC Member-State level. At the fore of these developments one routinely encounters, as in the 7th revision of the German Act Against Restraints on Competition (GWB), damage actions in private law court proceedings. A central problem in such proceedings is that the cartel-precipitated damages are passed-on along in subsequent transactions within the market chain. Thus, the question arises whether cartel-member defendants can counter with the defense that that direct purchasers have passed on their higher input costs to subsequent purchasers in the form of increased output costs. Whether these later purchasers are entitled to damages is equally debated.
 
In respect of German and EC competition law, answers to both these questions have been formulated, de lege lata and de lege ferenda, in a dissertation authored at the Institute. Underlying this effort is an economic and comparative law analysis, with particular focus placed on US law but also on German, French, English and European law. The work attempts to bring both the compensation and prevention aims of damages law into accord with one another as well as the insights of economic theory with the demands of civil procedure. At the conclusion of the work a proposed regulation for a secondary European legal act is set forth.