In order to stimulate academic research and education in industrial economics in the Netherlands, ENCORE annually awards a prize for the best master’s thesis in the field of competition and regulation. Seven theses competed for the ENCORE Master’s Thesis Prize 2004-2005.

MY THESIS WON!!! (Check out www.encore.nl).

The award was handed out by Marcel Canoy at the ENCORE annual conference, which was, by the way, an extremely interesting conference about consumer behaviour.

From the Jury Report:

First prize: Rosenstok

This year the prize winning study in the ENCORE master’s thesis prize deals with an issue that is of particular relevance for the practitioners in competition policy: the Dutch leniency guidelines and their application in actual Dutch cases. Academic economists, lawyers and economic policy makers will discover much food for thought in this thesis that in a highly original way attempts to theoretically evaluate a new instrument. Rosenstok’s thesis suggests alternatives with respect to the actual implementation of the leniency instrument in the Netherlands. Rosenstok bases his advice on international comparisons, case studies, a simple game theoretic model and he even attempts to fill in the deep parameters. As such the thesis offers reflection on an important competition policy instrument that has already proven its usefulness by means of no less than 486 leniency applications from the construction sector that the NMa is now processing.

In its decision to award the first prize to this thesis the jury is not blind for its limitations. What has been a decisive factor however is that this thesis does exactly what a good thesis should do. It analyses a social science problem, picks from the toolbox whatever is needed to come as close as possible to a decent answer, and does so in an original way in a field that is still pretty green. The thesis is also very well written and has convenient examples for readers with less patience or skills to get into the maths.

I don’t think I need to emphasise how happy I am with this outcome!

Check out the full jury report, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize theses and some photo’s here.

Adriaan and I wrote an article adressing the block exemption currently enjoyed by liner shipping. It has been published in the March edition of Markt en Mededinging.

Click here for the extract. Unfortunately the full text is available to subscribers only.