Linking academia and policy

A central objective of ENCORE is to improve the quality of competition and regulation research and to link scientific results with policy needs. Such linkage will be bidirectional: ENCORE will bring relevant developments in the theory and the empirics of industrial organization to the attention of policy makers, and will channel questions and perceived needs for academic research formulated by policy makers to academic specialists.

Through its research activities, ENCORE hopes to build a bridge between the sometimes theoretical world of science and the often practical demands of policy. The aim is to provide an attractive locus for cross-fertilization and interaction between scientific research and policy developments.

The research programme consists of a range of topics that will be used as a prime source for the specification of the contents of position papers and workshops, literature reviews and state-of-the-art papers, seminars and conferences, research monographs and doctoral dissertations.

An ongoing concern of ENCORE is the quality of theoretical and empirical research in the field of industrial organization in the Netherlands. To stimulate research quality and to increase variation, this programme review includes a general section on the methodological, technical and data issues related to achieving a world-class level of industrial organization research in the Netherlands.