International businesses often face a bewildering variety of laws that vary widely from country to country. With fines in the area of antitrust law sometimes approaching or exceeding $1 billion, global companies are calling for more research into what constitutes good antitrust enforcement practices.

To address these challenges, Penn Law’s Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition (CTIC), Penn Law professors Christopher Yoo and Jonathan Klick, and Wharton professor Joseph Harrington are joining with scholars from China and Europe to launch a three-year study comparing antitrust law in China, Europe, and the United States. The first year will focus on whether current administrative enforcement practices satisfy the demands of procedural fairness and the rule of law.

“Establishing a fair procedural framework has become critical for competition in the global economy,” said Yoo, the John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science and CTIC’s Founding Director. “This project will provide policymakers in all three jurisdictions with recommendations they can use to improve the ways that the antitrust laws are enforced.”

“The report will hopefully help policymakers to see the benefits of giving strong procedural protections to companies and individuals charged with anticompetitive behavior,” said Klick. “Our work should also provide insights into other areas of law that are enforced through administrative procedures.”

In addition to the analysis of U.S. law to be conducted at Penn, Professor Thomas Fetzer, the current Dean of the University of Mannheim Law School and the Director of the Mannheim Centre on Competition and Innovation (MaCCI), will examine competition law in the EU. Professor Huang Yong, the Director of the Competition Law Centre of the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), and Professor Guobin Cui, Director of the Center for Intellectual Property at the Tsinghua University School of Law, will evaluate Chinese anti-monopoly law.

CTIC is dedicated to promoting foundational research that aims to shape the way legislators, regulatory authorities, and scholars think about technology policy, intellectual property, privacy, and related fields. Through major scholarly conferences, symposia, faculty workshops, and other activities, CTIC is committed to providing a forum for exploring the full range of scholarly perspectives on these issues. Financial support for the project is being provided by Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm.