Unfair practices by online platforms have not only exclusionary effects on relevant markets but also exploitative effects on captive business users (and/or individual users). Nevertheless, attention is lopsided with most of the focus having been placed on the exclusionary abuse. With the aim of...

The triumph of the self-preferencing doctrine is not confined to Europe but is found in many other jurisdictions as well. Korea is a case in point. On December 14, 2022, the Seoul High Court decided that the Korean competition authority (i.e., Korea Fair Trade Commission, ‘KFTC’) was right...

This article examines the treatment in the EU of trade secrets, which are not recognized in many EU Member States as intellectual property. The authors analyze the EU’s obligations under international treaties (notably TRIPS) and under European law (notably the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights...

Competition law enforcement in the EU and in most EU Member States follows an administrative model: decisions on the infringement and on the fine are taken by an administrative agency; when courts are called upon to review these decisions they traditionally leave a large measure of discretion to...

Public choice scholars have claimed that antitrust, like all forms of regulation, is not about advancing the public good, but is instead about advancing private interests that have special influence on legislative and administrative processes. This article, published in 1999, uses the Microsoft...

The paper develops a four-step framework to detect anticompetitive horizontal mergers. In the first step, an estimate of the impact of the merger on the market price needs to be derived. Subsequent, the second step of the framework has to assess whether such a predicted price increase would be...

The last couple of years have seen an increasing interest in critical loss analysis, both, in academia and in practice. This development is documented by various research papers, high-level exchanges between antitrust experts as well as an increasing number of case decisions which make use of...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of methods for the empirical ex post evaluation of merger control decisions. It develops a competition-policy oriented framework of assessment criteria for the leading evaluation methods and applies them to structural modeling and simulation,...

Digital platforms facilitate interactions between consumers and merchants that allow collection of profiling information, which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in market failures both on-platform, among merchants, and...

Digital platforms are at the heart of online economic activity, connecting multi-sided markets of producers and consumers of various goods and services. Their market power and their privileged ecosystem positions raise concerns that they may engage in anti-competitive practices that reduce...