Der Deal der beiden größten deutschen Energielieferanten RWE und E.ON zum Tausch verschiedener Geschäftseinheiten, welcher Mitte September 2019 genehmigt wurde, wird den deutschen Energiemarkt wesentlich umstrukturieren und sowohl im Bereich Erzeugung als auch im Vertrieb zu jeweils einem...

Differences in prices paid by putative class members (quot;price dispersionquot;) often become a focal point for class certification in antitrust matters. This paper discusses how an economic analysis of the existence, extent, and nature of price dispersion faced by plaintiffs seeking class...

Price discrimination is one of the most complex areas of EC competition law. There are several reasons for this. First, the concept of price discrimination covers many different practices (discounts and rebates, tying, selective price cuts, discriminatory input prices set by...

Antitrust guarantees a particular distribution of wealth between consumers and producers. Big data allows firms with pricing power to identify the highest price a consumer is willing to pay for a good and charge it to her. The practice upends the current distribution of wealth by allowing firms...

Critics of current tying doctrine argue that metering ties can increase consumer welfare and total welfare without increasing output and that they generally increase both welfare measures. Contrary to those claims, we prove that metering ties always lower consumer welfare and total welfare...

The advent of big data analytics has favoured the emergence of forms of price discrimination based on consumers' profiles and their online behaviour (i.e. personalised pricing). The paper analyses this practice as a possible exploitative abuse by dominant online platforms. The paper argues that,...

The most pressing debates in antitrust today center on major platforms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Platform markets are subject to strong network effects, which tend to create barriers to entry and reinforce market power. Frequently, the only way for a new platform to enter the market...

I discuss the impact of tying, bundling, and loyalty/requirement rebates on consumer surplus in the affected markets. I show that the Chicago School Theory of a single monopoly surplus that justifies tying, bundling, and loyalty/requirement rebates on the basis of efficiency typically fails....

Our companion article developed a clear conceptual framework of negotiated or regulated interconnection agreements between rival operators and studied competition between interconnected networks, under the assumption of non-discriminatory pricing. This article relaxes this assumption and allows...

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,...