This comment is submitted by the Global Antitrust Institute (GAI) at Scalia Law School at George Mason University to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission regarding its hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century, The Consumer Welfare Standard in Antitrust Law. The GAI...

The central economic justification for competition law is that the protection of competition promotes welfare. In particular, perfect competition among firms catering to consumer demand for goods and services maximizes social welfare by generating both allocative and productive efficiencies....

Following years of deliberation, cogent steps are presently being taken to birth a competition policy and legislation in Nigeria. A draft of the Competition Policy for Nigeria has been released to private sector and the public for feedback. The draft policy, “Draft Competition and Consumer...

The digitalisation of the economy with data as the new critical resource is a technological revolution which requires an adaptation of the legal framework for markets and the economy. This paper analyzes the privacy concerns in the digital economy from an economics perspective. What can we learn...

Over the past ten years several EU Member States decided to integrate their competition authorities with their consumer protection agencies. In 2010, the Danish Competition Authority and the Danish Consumer Agency merged into the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority. In 2013 the Finnish...

In reliance on Qualcomm's FRAND promises, key SSOs incorporated its technologies into wireless standards. Qualcomm takes the position that its patented technologies are essential to those standards and, therefore, that any firm making or selling a standard-compliant product infringes its...

Competition policy like consumer protection, amongst other issues, seeks to forestall other forms of market failure such as formation of cartels, leading to collusive pricing, division of markets and joint decisions to reduce supply. There is a strong commonality between competition policy and...

More than a decade after the proclamation of consumer welfare as a goal of EU competition law, a fundamental question remains unanswered: namely, what is the content of the EU consumer welfare standard? What types of benefits and harms count respectively as welfare and as harm? Whose harm and...