The European Commission has published in 2013 a Practical Guide on the quantification of cartel damages. The Practical Guide provides comprehensive and detailed guidance. Drawn up by the Commission's services, the aim of this Practical Guide is to offer assistance to national courts and all relevant stakeholders that face quantification questions in relation to damages actions for antitrust infringements. To this end, it sets out the types of harm normally caused by anticompetitive practices and provides an overview of the main methods and techniques available to quantify such harm in practice.
Various methods are available to construct a non-infringement scenario for the purposes of quantifying the harm in damages actions in competition cases. The methods most widely used estimate what would have happened without the infringement by looking at the time periods before or after the infringement or at other markets that have not been affected by the infringement. Such comparator-based methods take the data (prices, sales volumes, profit margins or other economic variables) observed in the unaffected period or on the unaffected markets as an indication of the hypothetical scenario without the infringement. The implementation of these methods is sometimes refined by the use of econometric techniques, which combine economic theory with statistical or quantitative methods to identify and measure economic relationships between variables.
EE&MC has built up an extensive experience in the application of the methods and techniques described in the Commission's Practical Guide.