Something old and important is lost sight of in a case like Ohio v. American Express, the Supreme Court's recent adoption of "platform" or "two-sided market" theory in American antitrust, and in theoretical efforts like the one on which it is based. A rarely discussed idea built in to American...

This paper looks at how EU and U.S. competition laws deal with restrictions of online sales in distribution agreements, respectively. The growing importance of online commerce highlights how vertical competition law enforcement is still an important building block of competition law policies,...

This book chapter (forthcoming in Antitrust Stories) tells the story of the FTC's successful 1997 effort to block the proposed Staples/Office Depot merger. It describes the competing presentations of the FTC and the merging firms during the preliminary injunction hearing and places that trial in...

Competition policy and enforcement need to be able to keep pace with business models that have emerged in the digital age. Fittingly, Canada is in the midst of a review of its Competition Act that is addressing this question.A key goal of any reform should be to deter anti-competitive practices...

An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level...

This paper analyses the extent of inter-format retail competition between supermarkets, discounters and drugstores in Germany, using data from the German market for diapers. We estimate a random coefficient logit model at the individual household level. Based on consumer substitution patterns,...

In 2016 the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) lost motions for preliminary injunction in two separate hospital mergers. In both cases the district courts rejected the FTC's geographic market definition based on flawed interpretations of the “hypothetical monopolist” test. Fortunately, the...

This paper questions whether markets need contain products that are direct substitutes for consumers. It shows that there are many instances where markets consist of products that are not direct substitutes, and those which consumers cannot directly use or are at different functional levels in...

We describe a simple initial indicator of whether a proposed merger between rivals in a differentiated product industry is likely to raise prices through unilateral effects. Our diagnostic calibrates upward pricing pressure (UPP) resulting from the merger, based on the price/cost margins of the...

Considering the digital economy and the constant changes imposed by technological innovation, the definition of the relevant market of Big Data allows to understand the market structure and related issues to competition as mergers and acquisitions, market power, verticalization, abuse of...