The newly enacted Digital Markets Act (DMA) finds itself at a crossroads. The DMA can develop into a specialist field of competition law for digital platforms or it can evolve into a new field of EU law, detached from competition law. The DMA’s ultimate trajectory will depend on the legal...

In December 2020, the Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) was proposed. It was prepared by the European Commission (“EC”) following several years of work. The DMA attempts to improve “fairness” and contestability” in the digital sector. The DMA acknowledges that some companies designated...

Antitrust doctrine is under heavy fire in the academic literature. Modern criticism of antitrust doctrine attacks three ‘limits’ that would excessively constrain enforcement of the law: (i) the consumer welfare standard, (ii) the rule of reason, and (iii) a self-imposed neglect of labor...

The newly enacted Digital Markets Act (DMA) finds itself at a crossroads. The DMA can develop into a specialist field of competition law for digital platforms or it can evolve into a new field of EU law, detached from competition law. The DMA’s ultimate trajectory will depend on the legal...

The Metaverse provides an unprecedented opportunity to observe competition in the making and derive insights into the determinants of competition.Created in December 2022, the Metaverse Competition Agency (“MCA”) studies how economic competition emerges, evolves, and ends. The MCA method is...

Was the Lisbon Treaty primarily only remotely concerned with the practice of competition law? NIcolas Petit, Norman Neyrinck (University of Liege)

This paper looks at whether the standard unilateral effects model can be applied to non-price competition parameters such as innovation. This question arises because competition authorities are intervening in horizontal mergers that are found to give rise to a “significant impediment to...

Amongst the wealth of concerns raised by Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), one is the risk that the deployment of algorithmic pricing agents on markets will increase occurrences of tacit collusion by orders of magnitude, and well beyond the oligopoly setting where such markets failures have...

This paper studies the problem of patent holdout. Part I reviews the economic theory of holdout, with a specific emphasis on patents. It shows that the ordinary concept of holdout refers to the non-transacting conduct of a property owner, and that “patent trespass” is a better...

Enthused by China's conversion to the free market system in 1978 and its adoption of Western-style market institutions, the world has spent the last few decades turning a blind eye to China's real “governance” problem: that a shadow Party-State system permeates all branches of the economy....