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...

Concentration has increased since the 1980s in a variety of industries. Price-cost margins have also increased over this period. These developments have raised concern about weakened competition and resulting harm to consumers. Calls for tougher antitrust enforcement have become louder. Many...

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...

One key concern in vertical merger cases is input foreclosure. Input foreclosure involves raising the costs of competitors in the downstream market, which could in turn increase the sales and profits of the downstream merger partner. In this article, we explain how the upward pricing pressure...

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...

A central motivating factor for studying price markups is their effect on consumer welfare. Reported estimates of (firm-level) price markups in the literature, however, are often focused on industry or cross-country comparisons. These treat different industries equally rather than based on how...

Over the past forty years, antitrust has come to embrace a goal of consumer welfare maximization that cannot be achieved solely through condemnation of collusive or exclusionary conduct. To address cases in which firms achieve the power to raise prices and harm consumers without engaging in...

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 information age is replacing the Invisible Hand with an algorithmic hand. Where once markets were governed by uniform prices determined for large groups of anonymous consumers by impersonal forces of supply and demand, today there is increasingly no such thing as a market price. Instead,...