The role of collective redress actions to achieve full compensation for violations of European Union Competition Law

Abstract

In 2016, the European Union

adopted the Directive on damages actions, which seeks to ensure full

compensation for victims who have suffered harm caused by antitrust

infringement. With regard to mass harm situations, the Directive does not include provisions on collective actions, which may have significant impact on the achievement of full compensation. Instead, the non-binding Recommendation on collective redress was adopted, which has brought hardly any development in antitrust collective litigation. The aim of this dissertation has been to assist in the development of an appropriate approach of collective redress for better achievement of full compensation. Therefore, two private antitrust enforcement models were compared: the deterrence-based in the US and the compensation-oriented in the EU. It was found that collective redress actions would contribute to achieving full compensation only if US style deterrence-based measures were allowed in the EU. However, even if the best possible collective redress mechanism was introduced, the impact on full compensation would be limited, as the achievement of this objective requires fulfilling very high standards. Nevertheless, collective actions should not be denied, because they allow vulnerable victims to defend their rights in courts, as due to the low value harm, individual litigation becomes financially irrational.