The goal of antitrust policy is to protect and promote a vigorous competitive process. Effective rivalry spurs firms to introduce new and innovative products, as they seek to capture profitable sales from their competitors and to protect their existing sales from future challengers. In this...

In March 2006 the European Commission found that Tomra, a Norwegian producer of Reverse Vending Machines, had abused its dominance through the use of contracts that included exclusivity provisions, quantity commitments and retroactive rebates. The General Court of the European Union (the...

The European and Spanish gas and electricity markets are characterised by major policy challenges due to the complex and strategic nature of these markets. Public policy issues that are at stake in these markets include the challenge of introducing effective competition and regulation to ensure...

The antitrust treatment of loyalty discounts remains a highly topical debate in European competition policy. The European Commission has started to move towards a more economic approach to the evaluation of loyalty discounts (or rebates) with the publication of its Guidance Paper on exclusionary...

This article surveys, from an economic perspective, the recent application of merger control in the European energy sector. It considers ten significant transactions in the energy sector: the eight largest energy transactions assessed by the European Commission since 2004, as well as two major...

This paper examines the case for government-led smoothing of domestic petroleum prices in the face of volatile international prices. Governments in most developing and transition countries engage in petroleum price smoothing, as the survey of country practice carried out for this paper shows....

We analyze the impact of a merger on firms' incentives to innovate. We show that the merging parties always decrease their innovation efforts post-merger while the outsiders to the merger respond by increasing their effort. A merger tends to reduce overall innovation. Consumers are always worse...

Recent merger decisions by competition authorities have revived the debate on the relationship between competition and innovation. This article reviews this issue by drawing on the relevant economic literature, and by placing it in the broader policy debate on the benefits of competitive...

We set up a stylized oligopoly model of uncertain product innovation to analyze the effects of a merger on innovation incentives and on consumer surplus. The model incorporates two competitive channels for merger effects: the "price coordination" channel and the internalization of the...