Writing this book has been a very exciting and rewarding experience. The topic of international competition law and policy is one that I am very passionate about; my passion has grown over the years in parallel with the phenomenal increase in significance the topic has come to witness. International ‘elements’ are found nowadays in almost every single aspect of competition law and policy and this makes it necessary for everyone – whether competition officials, practitioners, judges, policymakers, business people, economists, students or others whose work has competition relevance – to develop an international-comparative perspective. This book therefore comes to make its own modest contribution to helping anyone interested in developing such perspective to do so in textbook style.

In setting out to complete the task at hand I have encountered many obstacles. First – and this is said with great pain – regretfully I sustained an extremely serious injury to my left (dominant) hand which left me simply unable to work on this book for some time. Although this was a major setback, my determination to complete the book received a major boost (and here I would like to thank Kim Hughes for the non-stop gentle reminders). A second obstacle was that – contrary to my prior (false!) hopes – life became phenomenally more (and not less) busy on the work front both within and outside ICC during the writing process: in particular, coordinating and teaching eight competition law courses attended by hundreds of students and serving as Director of the ICC have proved to be a full-time job indeed! Contrary to the hand injury however, this is an obstacle that added to the enjoyment of writing the book.