Optimal enforcement of competition policy: The commitments procedure under uncertainty

The introduction of a commitments procedure in EU antitrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003) has entitled the European Commission to extensively settle cases of alleged anticompetitive conduct. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement to identify the optimal procedure to remedy cases in a context of partial legal uncertainty (Katsoulacos and Ulph in Eur J Law Econ 41(2°: 255-282, 2016). We discuss in particular the merits of a policy of selective commitments where firms either take strong commitments or are investigated under the standard infringement procedure