Study On Leniency Program Under Anti-monopoly Law

With the continuous development of market economy, the role of competitionmechanism in practice becomes more and more important, however, the monopolyappearing in the process of profit pursuing is doing great harm to the order of marketand social welfare. The cartel agreement behavior has become the focus of theanti-monopoly law for its high secrecy. In order to detect the cartel agreement andimprove the efficiency of antitrust public execution, the United States takes the lead inintroducing the system of antitrust leniency program, followed by many other nations.According to the principle of the prisoner’s dilemma in economics, this programmanages to promote cartel members to report the secret cartel by setting thecorresponding conditions of forgiveness.In reality, however, the leniency program is found inefficient in investigating anddeterring cartel behavior. Antitrust leniency program in our country did not meet theexpectations at the very beginning. As of now, there is only two cases of antitrust usedthe leniency program.To this end, the paper adopts the economic analysis, comparative analysis andother research methods to reveal the shortage of the existing leniency programaccording to the data of empirical investigation and analysis. Then provide somesuggestions to promote and justify it. Firstly, introduce basic concepts, applicableconditions and functions of leniency. Secondly, detect the shortage of existingleniency program from the perspective of cost/benefit analysis, comparative analysissystem, internal governance, reputation incentive and reward incentive information onthe basis of introducing the development of the leniency program and analyzing thedata about the effective of the leniency program in China. At last, provide followingsuggestions:(a) establish an unified antitrust professional public enforcementagencies;(b) improve and refine the applicable subject and conditions of leniencyprogram, introduce the antitrust compliance program requirements, set up applicableprocedural provisions of leniency program;(c) set up additional mechanism, such asreputation guarantee and information reward system, to promote the effective ofleniency program.