Amongst the wealth of concerns raised by Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), one is the risk that the deployment of algorithmic pricing agents on markets will increase occurrences of tacit collusion by orders of magnitude, and well beyond the oligopoly setting where such markets failures have...

This paper studies the problem of patent holdout. Part I reviews the economic theory of holdout, with a specific emphasis on patents. It shows that the ordinary concept of holdout refers to the non-transacting conduct of a property owner, and that “patent trespass” is a better...

The Smallest Salable Patent Pricing Unit (SSPPU) is a valuation method used by courts and some Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) as a preliminary step towards the calculation of fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) royalties for licenses over Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs)....

Enthused by China's conversion to the free market system in 1978 and its adoption of Western-style market institutions, the world has spent the last few decades turning a blind eye to China's real “governance” problem: that a shadow Party-State system permeates all branches of the economy....

This paper proposes an understanding of abuse of collective dominance or shared monopolization that does not outlaw oligopolistic tacit collusion as such, but that reputes abusive a set of tactics adopted by tacitly colluding oligopolists exposed to disruption. As much as deviation is an...

This paper reviews the 2014 Intel judgment of the General Court of the EU in relation to exclusivity rebates given by dominant firms. It distinguishes between the positive issue – ie the legal standard currently applicable to the assessment of dominant firms' rebates – and the prospective...

The award of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Professor Jean Tirole in 2014 has generated intense interest about his brainchild theory of two-sided markets. Against this background, this paper explores whether there is such a thing as a unified theory of two-sided markets and whether the...

This paper seeks to understand the competitive impact of State restrictions to M&A transactions which target domestic corporations. In the economic literature, a rich body of papers has examined the impact of State restrictions in terms of market access, international trade and FDI. In contrast,...

Since the introduction of a formal commitments procedure in EU antitrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Bebchuk, 1984; Shavell, 1988)...

This short paper offers a first analysis of the UEFA's "break even requirement" under the EU competition rules. It shows that there are good reasons to believe that the UEFA Financial Fair Play regulation violates Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, in particular because it...