This paper analyses the dynamics of hotel prices listed on Booking.com in the period 2014-16. This period is characterised by the most important antitrust decisions regarding the use of price parity clauses by online travel agencies (OTAs) in the EU. First, we document the dynamics of hotel...

With e-commerce having accelerated over recent years, retailing has changed significantly. Manufacturers and retailers have established multichannel (offline/online) strategies within which pricing restraints often constitute a central element. Behind these strategies sits the firms' ambition to...

Online platforms often impose Price Parity Clauses to prevent sellers from charging lower prices on alternative sales channels. We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the full removal of Price Parity Clauses in France in 2015 for hotels listed on Booking.com. Our analysis reveals significant...

The ministerial proposal for a 10th amendment of the German competition law particularly addresses abuse control and seeks to tighten this pillar of competition policy against the background of the challenges from the digital economy. Next to extending the classic policy instruments of abuse...

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,...

Amazon is the largest e-commerce platform in many nations and its revenues have grown consistently over many years. Although Amazon has been subject to some antitrust investigations, competition law still has not fully grappled with the anticompetitive effects of Amazon’s business model, which...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

In this paper we criticize the so-called 'more economic approach' to European competition law for its disregard of the importance of a functional system of private law. The more economic approach presumes that vertical integration is an economically efficient governance-mechanism. This...

In a case currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court the court has been urged to overrule the longstanding per se illegality rule presently applicable to minimum resale price maintenance, or RPM. Over the past fifty years antitrust theorists and economists have advanced several...

Over the past fifty years antitrust theorists and economists have advanced several pro-competitive explanations for minimum resale price maintenance [RPM]. Additionally, scholars have argued that non-price vertical restraints (such as territorial exclusivity) and RPM have similar effects on...