This paper is concerned with the question of how to deal with Google Shopping’s position on online markets in order to prevent harm to public welfare. From the perspective of sellers and buyers of goods and services in Germany, Google can be seen as a gatekeeper to the Internet and thus as an...

In competition law, the problem of the optimal design of institutional and procedural rules concerns assessment processes of the pro- and anticompetitiveness of business behaviors. This is well recognized in the discussion about the relative merits of different assessment principles such as the...

Although both in US antitrust and European competition law there is a clear evolution to a much broader application of "rule of reason" (instead of per-se rules), there is also an increasing awareness of the problems of a case-by-case approach. The "error costs approach" (minimizing the sum of...