In the late 1990s the European Commission embarked on a long process of introducing a more economic approach to EU Antitrust law One by one it reviewed its approach to all three pillars of EU Antitrust Law starting with Article 101 TFEU moving on to EU merger control and concluding the process with Article 102 TFEU Its aim was to make EU antitrust law more compatible with contemporary economic thinking On the basis of an extensive empirical analysis of the Commission s main enforcement tools this book establishes the changes that the more economic approach has made to the Commission s enforcement practice over the past fifteen years It demonstrates that the more economic approach not only introduced modern economic assessment tools to the Commission s analyses but fundamentally changed the Commission s interpretation of the law Emulating one of the key credos of the US Antitrust Revolution thirty years earlier the Commission reinterpreted the EU antitrust rules as aiming at the enhancement of economic consumer welfare only and amended its understanding of key legal concepts accordingly
