The Croatian Competition Law and Policy Association (HDPPTN) is pleased to announce a series of upcoming lectures featuring distinguished international experts. We invite all HDPPTN members to join us for the first session in this series.
Event details:
- Speaker: Selçukhan Ünekbaş, European University Institute, Florence
- Moderator: Jasminka Pecotić Kaufman, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Economics & Business
- Date: February 27, 2026
- Time: 17:30 – 19:30
- Venue: Univeristy of Zagreb – Rectory (Rektorat)
- Address: Radoslava Cimermana 88, 10000 Zagreb, SEECEL Building
Title:
How do competition authorities learn? Selective Europeanization in Turkish merger control
Abstract: Competition policy is increasingly enforced by national authorities operating in parallel jurisdictions and confronting similar analytical problems. This raises a central question: how do competition authorities learn from each other when convergence obligations are soft rather than binding? This paper examines that question in merger control, using the EU-Turkey relationship as an empirical setting where alignment pressures coexist with enforcement autonomy. Drawing on a hand-coded dataset of Turkish merger decisions between 1995 and 2025 that cite the European Commission, the analysis moves beyond citation counts to measure the depth of engagement with Commission practice. Regression results indicate selective rather than linear convergence. Deeper engagement occurs when Commission decisions serve as analytical precedents, in core economic assessment stages such as market definition and competitive effects, and in industries the Turkish authority classifies as technologically complex. These findings suggest problem-driven analytical borrowing rather than mechanical emulation. They also highlight the limits of formal alignment as a proxy for convergence in global competition policy.
About the Speaker: Selçukhan Ünekbaş is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute, and a Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. His research interests converge on competition law and economics, merger policy, innovation, and competitiveness.