Benno Buehler

Benno Buehler is a vice president affiliated to the Munich and Brussels offices. Before joining CRA in 2019, he was a senior member of the European Commission’s DG Competition Chief Economist Team. He started his career at an international management consultancy.

With more than 15 years of competition experience, Benno has worked on many complex mergers, high profile antitrust cases and acted as expert in litigation. He has extensive experience in intellectual property matters. His experience covers a wide range of sectors, including digital platforms, (mobile) telecommunications and broadband, media, high-tech, construction, commodities and raw materials, paper, energy, and transport. In light of his experience at the European Commission, he is familiar with the perspective of competition agencies.

He was retained as economic expert in several standard essential patent (SEP) litigation cases and advised in multiple SEP licensing negotiations. He also conducted the economic analysis in multiple antitrust matters including the Samsung and Motorola SEP cases as well as the Amazon case on parity clauses. In addition, he was involved in several policy initiatives including the Commission’s overhaul of the Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation.

He was the lead economist on several high profile horizontal and non-horizontal mergers, both at CRA and at the European Commission, including PPF/CME, Qualcomm/NXP, T-Mobile NL/Tele2 NL, Tronox/Cristal, Three UK/Telefónica UK, Telenor/TeliaSonera, Orange/Jazztel, Telefónica DE/E-Plus, H3G/Orange, Glencore/Xstrata, Google/Motorola. Benno currently focuses on matters before national agencies as well as private negotiation/litigation.

His academic work has been published in scientific journals including the Journal of Industrial Economics and the European Economic Review. He has also published on competition policy in the Review of Industrial Organization as well as in Competition Law & Policy Debate. Benno regularly speaks at competition policy conferences and is a lecturer at the Brussels School of Competition.

He is a native German speaker, and is fluent in English and French.

Publications

Ex-post Analysis of Mobile Telecom Mergers: The Case of Austria and The Netherlands (with L. Aguzzoni, L. Di Martile, R. Kemp and A. Schwarz), 2017, De Economist, p. 1-25

Europe – The Final Countdown: Five, four, three … no, wait! (with T. Büttner, E. Ocello and M. Piergiovanni), 2017, Competition Law & Policy Debate, 3(4),  p. 18-30

Recent Developments at DG Competition: 2016/2017 (with D. Coublucq, C. Hariton, G. Langus and T. Valletti ), 2017, Review of Industrial Organization, 51(4),  p. 397–422

Recent developments in the assessment of efficiencies of EU mergers (with G. Federico), 2016, Competition Law & Policy Debate, 2(1),  p. 64-74

Do Roaming Alliances Harm Consumers?, 2015, Journal of Industrial Economics, 63(4), p. 642-672

Ex-post analysis of two mobile telecom mergers: T-Mobile/tele.ring in Austria and T-Mobile/Orange in the Netherlands (with L. Aguzzoni, L. Di Martile, R. Kemp, A. Schwarz, R. Stil, G. Ecker), 2015, DG Comp report

Recent developments at DG Competition: 2013–2014 (with X. Boutin, G. Koltay and M. Motta), 2014, Review of Industrial Organization, 45(4), p. 399-415

Certification and Minimum Quality Standards when some Consumers are Uninformed (with F. Schuett), 2014, European Economic Review, 70, p. 493-511

Ideologues: Explaining Partisanship and Persistence in Politics (with A. Kessler), 2010, CEPR Discussion Paper 7724