10. Legal Incentives for Compliance Programmes: Stick or Carrot?

One way to improve antitrust compliance may be to incentivise compliance programmes. Compliance programmes can certainly help undertakings detecting and remedying illegal behaviour. Infringements might be avoided by providing undertakings with incentives to intensify their compliance efforts. On a basic level, legislators can use two different approaches to foster compliance programmes. Undertakings can be legally obliged to introduce compliance programmes. Without a legal obligation, undertakings can still introduce compliance programmes on a voluntary basis, and the legislator can use incentives to motivate undertakings to use compliance programmes. In this chapter, these two ways of promoting compliance programmes are discussed by taking a comparative approach, which takes into account different legal systems. Based on the analysis, reservations in respect of a compliance defence are formulated.