The COVID-19 crisis noted many reports of dramatic price increases of essential items such as face masks, hand sanitisers and disinfectants. Already in March 2020 the Competition Authorities in Europe, by way of a joint statement by European Competition Network and individual public...

We provide an in-depth analysis of the price effects of two hospital mergers that occurred in the north shore suburbs of Chicago in early 2000: Evanston Northwestern Healthcare's (ENH) purchase of Highland Park Hospital (HPH) and the merger of St. Therese Medical Center (STMC) and Victory...

We examine recent claims that a particular Q-learning algorithm used by competitors 'autonomously' and systematically learns to collude, resulting in supracompetitive prices and extra profits for the firms sustained by collusive equilibria. A detailed analysis of the inner workings of this...

An important issue in many antitrust lawsuits involving professional sports leagues and their member teams is the extent to which franchises within the same, and across different, professional sports leagues compete with one another for fans and advertisers. Complicating the issue is the fact...

In a 5-4 antitrust decision in Leegin, the Supreme Court in 2007 overruled the nearly century-old precedent of Dr. Miles to end per se condemnation of minimum resale price maintenance (RPM) in favor of a rule of reason analysis. This decision places the United States at odds with the European...

The advance of the information age will allow firms to engage in personalized pricing, a form of price discrimination that is profitable for firms, but unambiguously harmful to consumers. Antitrust can protect consumers from personalized pricing—also called perfect price discrimination—by...

The paper reviews the different legal tools to regulate the personalised pricing and provide some policy recommendations in that regard. Section 1 provides a definition of the personalsied prices and analyses to which extend firms are currently personalising their practices. Section 2 deals with...

Amongst the wealth of concerns raised by Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), one is the risk that the deployment of algorithmic pricing agents on markets will increase occurrences of tacit collusion by orders of magnitude, and well beyond the oligopoly setting where such markets failures have...

Issues of “unfair” or excessive pricing traverse a number of potential abuses under Article 102 TFEU. Many refusal to deal cases involve situations in which a dominant firm insists on access terms that are uneconomic. Margin squeeze cases can also involve a wholesale price that is excessive...

In this article the forgotten role of prices in the analysis of vertical effects is described. While at least some vertical restraints have the potential to entail anticompetitive harm, it is demonstrated that competition law may be overshooting the mark if no account is taken of both, the...