Leegin and the literature on resale price maintenance (RPM) have largely overlooked the Internet phenomenon despite the fact that it has substantially changed the way many consumers shop. This paper looks at the characteristics of Internet retailing and explores how they may affect the free...

Production costs play a crucial role in competition policy and price regulation. A shared purpose of both policies is to keep prices close to production costs to the benefit of the consumers and of the society as a whole. The problem is that prices are per product and costs are per firm. So, 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...

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...

In this comprehensive review of ex-post merger studies price effects of horizontal transactions are evaluated. By combining and further analyzing the results of 52 retrospective studies on 82 mergers or merger-like transactions it can be shown that the industry alone is no strong indication for...

This paper expands on an idea recently voiced by neo-Brandeisians and formally modelled by economists in the past two decades – namely, that the Chicago School’s arguments for the harmless and efficiency generating nature of vertical integration do not apply on zero-priced monetized markets....

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

Retailers act as both customers and competitors for brand manufacturers when selling private label in direct competition with brands. This paper considers whether retailers exploit this double-agent position to practice switch marketing, manipulating elements of the retail marketing mix to...

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...

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...