Friedrich A. von Hayek’s (1899-1992) view of competition as a discovery process is well known but little used. His central thesis is that a competitive pricing system is the most effective way to coordinate economic activity and economise on the information held by market participants in a...

The model of perfect competition is one of the most famous, most important, and most misunderstood concepts in economics. Rather than aiming to be a full-blown model of real-world competitive markets, the perfect competition model isolates the decentralized coordination mechanism inherent in all...

A dreary debate has occupied the antitrust community over the past 30 years. The debate is a more elegant, scholarly version of the commercials for Miller Lite beer that ran during much of the same period. In the beer commercials, one group of modestly recognizable celebrities and personalities...

More than a decade after the proclamation of consumer welfare as a goal of EU competition law, a fundamental question remains unanswered: namely, what is the content of the EU consumer welfare standard? What types of benefits and harms count respectively as welfare and as harm? Whose harm and...

The model of perfect competition is one of the most famous, most important, and most misunderstood concepts in economics. Rather than aiming to be a full-blown model of real-world competitive markets, the perfect competition model isolates the decentralized coordination mechanism inherent in all...

Over the past decades behavioral economics has gained widespread consensus, and, as a consequence, is affecting many areas of law and economics. Antitrust is currently providing an interesting case-study of this new cultural-academic wave, with a growing number of articles and comments focusing...

Although law and economics has influenced nearly every area of American law, few have been as deeply and as thoroughly "economized" as antitrust. Beginning in the 1970s, antitrust law—traditionally informed by populist hostility to economic concentration—was dramatically transformed by a new...

The power of today’s tech giants has prompted calls for changes in antitrust law and policy which, for decades, has been exceedingly permissive in merger enforcement and in constraining dominant firm conduct. Economically, the fear is that the largest digital platforms are so dominant and its...

In comparing the historical circumstances in which ordoliberalism emerged with the socio-economic and political trends of today, this study identifies parallels that can provide useful insights into tackling current challenges in the digital age. On this basis, the study explores whether...

This paper explores the impact of ordoliberal thinking on the drafting of the prohibition of “abuse” of a dominant position in the market that was included in the competition rules of the Rome Treaty establishing the European Economic Community as well as on its interpretation by the...