The purpose of this working paper is to demonstrate that European competition lawyers – or at least most of them – do not need a shrink. More seriously, this paper underlines that a significant body of behavioral economics has already penetrated European Union (“EU”) competition law, in...

The purpose of the present article is to offer thoughts on the “Guidance Communication on the Commission’s Enforcement Priorities in Applying Article 82 of the EC Treaty” and, in particular, to review the requirements which the Commission must meet in Article 82 EC cases when it purports...

Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, recently published a book titled "Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader". In the book, he takes the reader on a journey from his years of early enthusiasm for computer technology to the founding and management of a...

This paper lays down the rudiments of a descriptive theory of competition among the digital tech platforms known as “FANGs” (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google), amidst rising academic and policy polarization over the answer to what seems to be – at least at the formulation level – a...

The IEEE-SA updated patent policy and the Business Review Letter issued by the US DoJ have caused much discussion in the US (Sidak, 2015). The purpose of this paper is to assess whether a similarly lenient antitrust approach to Standard Setting Organizations’ (“SSOs”) rate setting policies...

In the last years, some Standard-Setting Organizations (“SSOs”) active in wireless communications have experimented new pricing principles for standard essential patents (“SEPs”). One of those experiments is the “SSPPU” rule. Under SSPPU, the licensing rates paid to owners of SEPs...

This paper argues that the judgment of the Court of Justice of the EU in Huaweï v ZTE is of conservative craft. Huaweï v ZTE only extends by a razor-thin margin the zone of antitrust liability for patent owners. The Court appears reluctant to relax its traditional case-law that affirms...

This paper seeks to examine whether the legal standards underpinning the application of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) need to be revisited in light of the alleged specificities of “technology-enabled” markets. To this end, the paper is divided in...

The first prong of Article 82 of the EC Treaty, which prohibits abuses of a dominant position, requires, prior to the identification of abusive behaviour, evidence that the firm under scrutiny enjoys a dominant position. Surprisingly, this issue seems to be sometimes overlooked. Enforcers,...