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...

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...

This article examines the meaning and scope of the notion of anticompetitive effects in EU competition law. It does so by bringing together several strands of the case law (and this across all provisions, namely Articles 101 and 102 TFEU and merger control). The analysis is structured around a...

The paper provides an overview of the enforcement activity of the Spanish competition authority in the digital economy. It explores, in particular, (i) the authority's approach to market definition and the assessment of market power; (ii) the main theories of harm developed in its decisions; and...

• There is not a unique legal test in EU competition law. There is conduct that is prima facie unlawful irrespective of its effects, and conduct that is lawful. In between, some practices are prohibited where actual or likely effects can be shown.• This paper seeks to map the various tests...