The purpose of this study is to assess whether competition agencies (“CAs”) do, and in turn should, enjoy an unfettered discretionary power in the context of the investigation of competition law infringements or whether their margin of discretion should be subject to certain limits. To this...

This paper offers a complete overview of the oligopoly problem in competition law and economics, with a specific focus on European Union (EU) law. A related purpose of the paper is to challenge the dominant view that merger control is the ultimate preventive remedy against tacit collusion. On...

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 first prong of Article 82 of the EC Treaty, which prohibits abuses of a dominant position, requires, prior to the identification of abusive behaviour, evidence that the firm under scrutiny enjoys a dominant position. Surprisingly, this issue seems to be sometimes overlooked. Enforcers,...

Price discrimination is one of the most complex areas of EC competition law. There are several reasons for this. First, the concept of price discrimination covers many different practices (discounts and rebates, tying, selective price cuts, discriminatory input prices set by...

A large body of scholarship demonstrates that press coverage is beset with biases. Contemporary media coverage of large firms operating in the digital economy suggests that some of these biases may be at work when the press describes them as “monopolies.” We test this hypothesis by analyzing...

The main objective of this article is to shed light on the compatibility of price discrimination with EC competition law. We offer an analytical framework which distinguishes between different categories of price discrimination depending on their effects on competition. Our framework suggests...

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...