This paper deals with the question what the relationship is between consumer activity and non-competitive market outcomes in deregulated markets. These market failures could be the result of bad regulation, bad competition law enforcement or insufficient consumer activity. The different causes...

Most technical standards development organizations (SDOs) have adopted internal policies embodying “due process” criteria such as openness, balance of interests, consensus decision making, and appeals. Unlike other aspects of SDO governance, relatively little scholarly research has...

Practices and conducts in professional and even amateur sports can be subject to competition laws as soon as commercial activities are involved. From an economic perspective, this implies that both directly commercial activities like the sale of broadcasting/media rights and indirectly...

Recent allegations from participants of the FIA Formula One World Championship (F1) suggest that the promoter of F1 (possibly together with the sports association) violates European competition law in two ways. First, it allegedly abuses its market power by deducting an inappropriate high share...

The theory of competitive balance represents one of the core concepts of sports economics. Based upon an international research project analyzing the perception of competitive balance by consumers (Pawlowski 2013a, 2013b; Pawlowski & Budzinski 2013, 2014), we argue in this paper that behavioural...

This publication (of 138 pages) represents the proceedings of a roundtable on the competition issues related to sports that was held at the OECD in October 1996. The proceedings include submissions from 13 OECD countries outlining the competition issues that have arisen in the sports sector in...

I present an overview of the antitrust literature on sports leagues, with particular emphasis on the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League, as well as on sanctioning...

The European Commission appears to be considering to open a new antitrust case against the owners of the FIA Formula One World Championship (F1), which by some accounts represents the second biggest sports business in the world. Specifically, two interrelated concerns are raised: (i) a violation...

This comment addresses the opinion of the Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice on the pending case European Super League versus UEFA/FIFA. It takes a critical perspective on selected aspects of the opinion’s reasoning from a (sports) economics perspective. Highlighting the...

Die Digitalisierung der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen stellt die Wettbewerbspolitik vor erhebliche Herausforderungen. Um diesen zu begegnen, soll das Gesetz gegen Wettbewerbsbeschränkungen (GWB) mit Hilfe der 9. Novelle fit gemacht werden für das digitale Zeitalter. Der vorliegende Beitrag gibt eine...