This paper looks at whether the standard unilateral effects model can be applied to non-price competition parameters such as innovation. This question arises because competition authorities are intervening in horizontal mergers that are found to give rise to a “significant impediment to...

The Supreme Court recently held that in reverse-payment settlements of drug patent disputes, anticompetitive effects can be inferred if the reverse payment exceeds the patent holder's anticipated litigation costs, absent some offsetting justification. Application of this standard is problematic...

Courts and commentators are sharply divided about how to assess “reverse payment” patent settlements under antitrust law. The essential problem is that a PTO-issued patent provides only a probabilistic indication that courts would hold that the patent is actually valid and infringed, and...

This study is intended to provoke discussion on the practical effects of unfair trading practices (‘UTPs’) in the market and the necessity of new UTPs regulation at EU level.Section 2 addresses the notion of UTPs and their effects. UTPs in vertical business-to-business (‘B2B’) relations...

This paper shows that the technology giants that antitrust agencies tend to characterize as entrenched monopolists can also be seen as firms engaged in a process of vibrant oligopolistic competition. Those firms - we refer to them as "moligopolists" - compete against the non-consumption in...

The Opinion delivered by Advocate General Wahl in Intel v Commission (“the Opinion”) invites the Court of Justice of the EU (“CJEU”) to “refine its case-law relating to the abuse of a dominant position” under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (“TFEU”). In...

In European legal scholarship, many articles discuss the equilibrium reached in the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) when the EU antitrust prohibitions apply to, and restrain, the free and ordinary use of intellectual property rights (“IPRs”). We call this...

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...

In European Union ("EU") competition law, the supply policy of a dominant input provider can be deemed unlawful, if his wholesale and retail price-mix forces rival input purchasers to compete at a loss on the downstream market. This is known as an abusive "margin squeeze". Whilst this stands to...