The European Court of Justice’s definition of when a firm has a dominant position <p> has recently come under attack as being meaningless and impossible to measure. We argue that <p> both attacks are wrong, suggest an economic interpretation of domination and propose how it may <p> be measured using...</p></p></p>

We develop a model of vertical pricing in which an original manufacturer sets wholesale prices in two markets integrated at the distributor level by parallel imports (PI). In this context we show that if competition policy requires uniform wholesale prices across locations it would push retail...

This report studies the importance of efficiency gains from horizontal mergers. A general theme throughout this report is that efficiency gains, and their pass-on to consumers, may vary substantially from merger to merger. For this reason it seems appropriate to reconsider current practice in...

Intellectual property rights and competition policy are intimately related. In this paper I survey the economic literature analyzing the interaction between intellectual property law and competition law and how the boundary between these two policies is drawn in practice. Recognizing that...

Anticompetitive mergers benefit competitors more than the merging firms. We show that such externalities reduce firms' incentives to merge (a holdup mechanism). Firms delay merger proposals, thereby foregoing valuable profits and hoping other firms will merge instead - a war of attrition. The...

We examine coordinated effects of mergers in the Swedish retail market for gasoline during the period 1986-2002. Despite significant changes in market concentration and many factors conductive to coordination, the empirical analysis shows that the level of coordination is low. In addition,...

A government wanting to promote an efficient allocation of resources as measured by the total surplus, should strategically delegate to its competition authority a welfare standard with a bias in favour of consumers. A consumer bias means that some welfare increasing mergers will be blocked....

Recently, the European Commission has decided to implement a simplified procedure in the context of vertical integration. If the combined market shares of the merging firms are less than 25 percent, upstream and downstream, the Commission will consider the merger harmless. The purpose of this...

This paper first presents stylised evidence showing how the date of the introduction of competition policy is correlated with country size. Smaller countries tend to adopt competition policy later. We thereafter present a simple theoretical model with countries of different size and firms...

The purpose of this study is to analyse theoretically the implications of applying the procedure for market delineation used by competitions authorities in the EU and in the US. Specifically, we investigate the circumstances under which the procedure will lead to positive relation between actual...