Something old and important is lost sight of in a case like Ohio v. American Express, the Supreme Court's recent adoption of "platform" or "two-sided market" theory in American antitrust, and in theoretical efforts like the one on which it is based. A rarely discussed idea built in to American...

This paper looks at how EU and U.S. competition laws deal with restrictions of online sales in distribution agreements, respectively. The growing importance of online commerce highlights how vertical competition law enforcement is still an important building block of competition law policies,...

This book chapter (forthcoming in Antitrust Stories) tells the story of the FTC's successful 1997 effort to block the proposed Staples/Office Depot merger. It describes the competing presentations of the FTC and the merging firms during the preliminary injunction hearing and places that trial in...

Competition policy and enforcement need to be able to keep pace with business models that have emerged in the digital age. Fittingly, Canada is in the midst of a review of its Competition Act that is addressing this question.A key goal of any reform should be to deter anti-competitive practices...

Fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) constitute a large part of consumers' budget in all countries. The retail sector for FMCGs in Turkey is in the process of a drastic transformation. New, "modern" retail formats, like chain stores and hyper/supermarkets, have rapidly diffused in almost all major...

This paper analyses the extent of inter-format retail competition between supermarkets, discounters and drugstores in Germany, using data from the German market for diapers. We estimate a random coefficient logit model at the individual household level. Based on consumer substitution patterns,...

Given various recent antitrust investigations on the retail sector, we deal with uncovering demand systems substitution patterns for a particular market (diapers) to investigate the inter-format competition (supermarkets vs. discounters vs. drugstores). Using the uncovered demand system we...

In 2016 the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) lost motions for preliminary injunction in two separate hospital mergers. In both cases the district courts rejected the FTC's geographic market definition based on flawed interpretations of the “hypothetical monopolist” test. Fortunately, the...

This paper questions whether markets need contain products that are direct substitutes for consumers. It shows that there are many instances where markets consist of products that are not direct substitutes, and those which consumers cannot directly use or are at different functional levels in...

We describe a simple initial indicator of whether a proposed merger between rivals in a differentiated product industry is likely to raise prices through unilateral effects. Our diagnostic calibrates upward pricing pressure (UPP) resulting from the merger, based on the price/cost margins of the...