The ministerial proposal for a 10th amendment of the German competition law particularly addresses abuse control and seeks to tighten this pillar of competition policy against the background of the challenges from the digital economy. Next to extending the classic policy instruments of abuse...

Platforms like Uber, Google Search, and Hulu pervade the modern economic landscape. A platform caters to distinct but deeply-interdependent “sides” of customers that derive value or revenues from one another, such as the merchants and cardholders on a credit card network, or the advertisers...

Periods of profound innovation and technological change invariably result in short run winners and losers. The rise of big box retailers like Wal-Mart, as well as the existence of large supermarket chains, has led competition authorities to focus anew on the issue of buyer power. Antitrust...

This chapter analyzes Big Data and Big Data abuses of market power. The chapter provides an overview of developments under both EU and US case law relevant to such abuses as well as some of the economic underpinnings of such an analysis. While there are not many cases specific to this interface,...

This is a survey of the economic principles that underlie antitrust law and how those principles relate to competition policy. We address four core subject areas: market power, collusion, mergers between competitors, and monopolization. In each area, we select the most relevant portions of...

Large platforms are often accused of refusing to serve (or discriminating against) competing sellers in adjacent product markets. Antitrust law labels such activity a unilateral “refusal to deal” (RTD) and evaluates it under a predation-like framework shaped by the two leading RTD cases,...

The prohibition of certain types of anticompetitive unilateral conduct by firms possessing a substantial degree of market power is a cornerstone of competition law regimes worldwide. Yet notwithstanding the social costs of monopoly modern legal regimes refrain from prohibiting it outright....

This comment addresses the opinion of the Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice on the pending case European Super League versus UEFA/FIFA. It takes a critical perspective on selected aspects of the opinion’s reasoning from a (sports) economics perspective. Highlighting the...

In this article we examine exclusionary coalitions: groups of suppliers and customers that work collectively to keep out rivals and share in the resulting benefits. We offer a typology of horizontal and vertical coalitions, which we connect to economic theories about how exclusion is...

This paper argues that the New Zealand legislation against abuse of market power, and subsequent jurisprudence, is ineffective to deal with the problem, in particular by relying on a counterfactual test - would a firm without market power have done the same thing, and if so, the firm with market...