This chapter identifies factors that shape all competition law regimes. These “shaping factors” serve as guideposts that highlight relevant information about a regime (“here’s where to look”) and point to the most valuable questions to ask for understanding it. These include, for example: size, openness, and technological capacity of the economy; political and bureaucratic contexts of competition law; importance of the “rule of law”; and ideologies, culture, and religion, and global role of the state. A particularly influential shaping factor can create similarities among competition law regimes that are otherwise difficult to recognize. Three examples show the value of identifying such factors: East Asia (bureaucratic centralism), Latin America (embedded social stratification), and developing countries (recent colonialism). Recognizing these factors and their influence can be of great value in looking at any regime! The objective is to penetrate the details, make sense of them, and guide entry into and through them.