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...

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Professor Jean Tirole in 2014 has generated intense interest about his brainchild theory of two-sided markets. Against this background, this paper explores whether there is such a thing as a unified theory of two-sided markets and whether the...

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....

This paper shows that the technology giants that antitrust agencies tend to characterize as entrenched monopolists can also be seen as firms engaged in a process of vibrant oligopolistic competition. Those firms - we refer to them as "moligopolists" - compete against the non-consumption in...

The Opinion delivered by Advocate General Wahl in Intel v Commission (“the Opinion”) invites the Court of Justice of the EU (“CJEU”) to “refine its case-law relating to the abuse of a dominant position” under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (“TFEU”). In...

In European legal scholarship, many articles discuss the equilibrium reached in the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) when the EU antitrust prohibitions apply to, and restrain, the free and ordinary use of intellectual property rights (“IPRs”). We call this...

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...

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...

This paper proposes an understanding of abuse of collective dominance or shared monopolization that does not outlaw oligopolistic tacit collusion as such, but that reputes abusive a set of tactics adopted by tacitly colluding oligopolists exposed to disruption. As much as deviation is an...

This paper reviews the 2014 Intel judgment of the General Court of the EU in relation to exclusivity rebates given by dominant firms. It distinguishes between the positive issue – ie the legal standard currently applicable to the assessment of dominant firms' rebates – and the prospective...