공정거래소송에 있어서 경제적 증거 평가에 대한 일고찰

As the Korean competition law, which mainly purse market efficiency, contains a lot of economic terms, such as "market", "price", "supply", "demand", "competition", and "efficiency", it may be natural to say that economic evidence can play an important role in determining whether or not a firm's conduct is inconsistent with the law. Indeed, recent Supreme Court's antitrust cases well show that economic evidence may be highly valuable in complex and empirical antitrust issues. On the other hand, it should be noted that lay judges are not familiar with economic reasoning and statistical methodologies on which economic evidence is based. Since it is difficult for lay judges to understand the methods of economics, there exists possibility that they could make false-positive or false negative error in evaluating complex economic evidence. When any type of errors occurs, economic efficiency will be hampered by the mistaken decision. It will be ordinary consumers who lastly bear costs occurring from mis-evaluating economic evidence. In order to avoid making an error in evaluating economic evidence, it is suggested that judges actively use court-appointed neutral expert witness or special expert commissioner under the Civil Procedure Act. If judges properly use well-qualified economic experts who are neutral, we may expect that they assess economic evidence as exactly as possible in the way market efficiency can be obtained.