Europe is increasingly becoming an everyday reality for many companies, not only for large corporations but small and medium-sized enterprises as well. European Competition offers students an introduction to the field of competition, cooperation and competition policy in the EU. To increase students' understanding of the workings of the Internal Market, most chapters start with case-studies. The book focuses on the subject areas economics and law and is written from both a business and a social/legal perspective. The book consists of the following topics: Competition and Competition Policy (including regulations and distortion of competition) Micro economic theory like prisoner's dilemma Market Dominance and Competition Policy Cooperation; Cartels & Strategic Alliances Legal Aspects of Cooperation Mergers & Acquisitions European Competition Law in an International Perspective EU competition & State Aid European Competition is an essential introductory textbook for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels in a wide range of degree and professional programmes. Including Economics, MBA and Law. It is of particular relevance to students interested in the European context of these disciplines and can be used as a core textbook for courses in European Integration or Business and International Environment in Europe and other parts of the world. This text is complementary to the book European Business Environment.

This book is the only comprehensive guide to the competition regimes of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chinese developments are placed in the context of the adoption of competition regimes by developing and transitional states world-wide and also in relation to the influence of trans-national organisations on transitional states to adopt market-based economic strategies. The book adopts an inter-disciplinary approach considering the political, economic and legal issues relevant to competition policy adoption. The paradoxical phenomenon of Communist mainland China seeking to adopt a pro-competition law, whilst capitalist Hong Kong refuses to do so, is explained and contrasted with the successful Taiwanese adoption of a competition regime over a decade ago. The underlying economic and political forces that have shaped this unusual matrix are discussed and analysed with a theoretical explanation offered for the existing state of affairs.

What rules or principles govern the assessment of evidence in EU competition enforcement? This book offers, for the first time, a comprehensive academic study on the topic. Its aim is twofold. Firstly, it produces a typology of evidence standards in competition proceedings at the EU level, thereby systemising the guidance that is currently dispersed in the case-law of the EU Courts. Secondly, it examines the applicable evidence rules and principles with a view to better understanding their role in EU competition enforcement. In so doing, the book illustrates that evidence standards are not mere technicalities and their significance should not be underestimated. Rigorous and engaging, this work provides a much-needed analysis of a key question of EU competition enforcement.

Can a price ever be too low? Can competition ever be ruinous? Questions like these have always accompanied American antitrust law. They testify to the difficulty of antitrust enforcement, of protecting competition without protecting competitors. As the business practice that most directly raises these kinds of questions, predatory pricing is at the core of antitrust debates. The history of its law and economics offers a privileged standpoint for assessing the broader development of antitrust, its past, present and future. In contrast to existing literature, this book adopts the perspective of the history of economic thought to tell this history, covering a period from the late 1880s to present times. The image of a big firm, such as Rockefeller's Standard Oil or Duke's American Tobacco, crushing its small rivals by underselling them is iconic in American antitrust culture. It is no surprise that the most brilliant legal and economic minds of the last 130 years have been engaged in solving the predatory pricing puzzle. The book shows economic theories that build rigorous stories explaining when predatory pricing may be rational, what welfare harm it may cause and how the law may fight it. Among these narratives, a special place belongs to the Chicago story, according to which predatory pricing is never profitable and every low price is always a good price.

The EU and the US are the preeminent examples of multi-level polities and both have highly developed competition policies. Despite these similarities however, recent developments suggest that they are moving in different directions in the area of antitrust federalism. This book examines multi-level governance in competition policy from a comparative perspective. The book analyses how competition laws and authorities of different levels - the federal and the state levels in the US and the national and the supranational levels in the EU - interact with each other. Inspired by the increasingly divergent policy developments taking place on both sides of the Atlantic, the author asks whether the EU and the US can draw policy lessons from each other's experiences in antitrust federalism. Antitrust Federalism in the EU and the US reveals the similarities and differences between the European and American models of antitrust federalism whilst employing policy network models in its comparative analysis of issues such as opacity and accountability in networks. The book is essentially multidisciplinary in its effort to initiate dialogue between the Law and Political Science literatures in this field. This book will be of particular interest to academics, students and practitioners of Competition Law, Constitutional Law and Political Science.

A trenchant account of an unacknowledged driver of inequality and wage stagnation in America: the abandonment of antitrust law, which has allowed corporations to combine into a smaller number of massive conglomerates whose market dominance robs workers of their bargaining power. The consequences of the massive consolidation wave in corporate America that began decades ago are now increasingly apparent: labor markets are no longer competitive. Since the 1970s, Americans have seen income and wealth inequality skyrocket-and job opportunities stagnate. There are many theories of why this happened, including the decline of organized labor and the introduction of tax policies that favored the rich. However, another crucial event was the precipitous decline in antitrust enforcement that began in earnest during the Reagan administration. With ever-increasing combination and consolidation, workers had fewer options to turn to. In How Antitrust Law Failed Workers, Eric Posner documents the role of antitrust in our economy and why it failed. Only through reforming antitrust law can we shield workers from employers' overwhelming market power. As Posner explains, antitrust laws were created to protect the labor market by attacking monopolies, like Facebook and Google today, that are able to either charge high prices or degrade the quality of their services because customers cannot switch to competitors. Antitrust laws are also used to attack business cartels that can fix prices. In recent years, it has become clear that firms with market power not only charge higher prices; they also suppress wages and output. Many employers use anticompetitive devices-like covenants not to compete for workers and no-poaching agreements-to advance their market power at the expense of workers. Posner shares stories that illustrate how the problem is playing out on the ground, and then contextualizes what is going on via a concise history of the American economy and labor relations since the 1980s. Essential reading for anyone interested in fighting economic inequality, How Antitrust Failed Workers also offers a sharp primer on the true nature of the American economy-one that is increasingly uncompetitive and tilted against workers.

Competition policy-encompassing cartels, monopolies, mergers and state aid-is a hallmark of the European Union (EU). In recent decades, the EU's competition policy has evolved under pressures from globalization. The EU in turn has been a key actor driving the globalization of the world economy through its increasingly active competition policy. This volume identifies and explores the major transformations that EU competition policy has undergone in the last decade in response to various pressures related to globalization, in particular, economic interdependence, the proliferation of national and regional competition regimes, and the financial and economic crisis. The individual chapters, written by specialists of EU competition policy from both sides of the Atlantic and from the perspectives of political science, management and public policy, investigate how the EU has responded to these challenges in each area of competition policy, and demonstrate that it has, on balance, been quite successful in responding to them, with some exceptions in the areas of state aid and mergers. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

In the early decades of European integration, the enforcement of EU competition law was highly centralized. Virtually all enforcement actions under Articles 101 and 102 TFEU were initiated by the European Commission. More recently, the enforcement of EU competition law has become less centralized - many would say even decentralized. In 2004, essentially in an effort to increase enforcement capacity in the wake of EU enlargement, the involvement of Member State competition authorities was significantly reinforced by national authorities being given power to pursue infringements of EU competition law, largely on the basis of their domestic enforcement regimes. This combination of decentralization and enforcement autonomy raises questions about the relationship between EU law and national law, as well as about the costs of enforcement. Sanctions in EU Competition Law links these questions by analyzing how competences in the area of sanctions are distributed between EU and national law, and how this influences the costs of enforcement. The author's conclusions - which highlight the economic implications of the choices made by competition authorities, courts, and legislators - will be of use to all the above in further developing EU competition policy. The thesis on which this book is based was declared runner-up in the 2013 Concurrences Awards. (Series: Hart Studies in Competition Law)

This book analyses multi-level governance in competition policy, or "antitrust federalism" as it is called by students of competition policy, in the US and the EU from a comparative perspective. The book compares how competition laws and authorities of different levels - the federal and the state levels in the US and the national and the supranational levels in the EU - interact with each other. The EU and the US stand among the strongest existing examples of multi-level polities and they developed mature competition policies. Despite such similarities, however, recent developments imply that they are moving in different directions in the field of antitrust federalism.

Inspired by these divergent policy developments taking place at both sides of the Atlantic, the book addresses three principal research questions: firstly, what are the key similarities and differences between the US and the EU in terms of antitrust federalism; secondly, what are the reasons for differences (if any), and finally, can the US and the EU draw any policy lessons from each others experiences in antitrust federalism? The book is essentially multidisciplinary in nature and it aims to initiate a dialogue between the law and political science literatures in its field.

The book argues that the legal literature of antitrust federalism has employed out of date regulatory competition models which do not reflect the complexities of policy enforcement in modern multi-level polities. The book suggests that policy network models provide a more suitable framework for this analysis; and it critically reviews the British and Continental European policy network models. The book uses the common conceptual framework of European policy network models as the main analytical framework in the analysis of antitrust federalism. However, the book also shows that constitutional courts significantly affect different network designs in different polities through interpretation of constitutional power sharing and exercise mechanisms; and it critiques the political science literature for overlooking such essential role of the constitutional courts in building network models.

This book charts the emergence of experimentalist governance in the implementation of EU competition law as a response to uncertainty and the limits of hierarchical enforcement in an increasingly dynamic and heterogeneous economic environment. It contributes to ongoing debates about the current state of EU competition law and provides an innovative account of emergent enforcement trends and its future direction. It also argues that an experimentalist evolution of competition law and market regulation attenuates concerns about the competitive strictures of EU law on national economic and regulatory institutions. Through its focus on experimentalist governance, the book provides guidance on completing experimentalist infrastructures for market regulation, as well as on the role of courts in triggering and sustaining experimentalist solutions. As such, it offers a novel perspective on implementing competition law in the EU and beyond.

European Commission Decisions on Competition provides a comprehensive economic classification and analysis of all European Commission decisions adopted pursuant to Articles 101, 102 and 106 of the FEU Treaty from 1962 to 2009. It also includes a sample of landmark European merger cases. The decisions are organised according to the principal economic theory applied in the case. For each economic category, the seminal Commission decision that became a reference point for that type of anticompetitive behaviour is described. For this, a fixed template format is used throughout the book. All subsequent decisions in which the same economic principle was applied are listed chronologically. It complements the most widely used textbooks in industrial organisation, competition economics and competition law, to which detailed references are offered. The book contains source material for teachers and students, scholars of competition law and economics, as well as practising competition lawyers and officials.

With the international community on the brink of an explosion of private remedies for violation of national competition laws, this timely Handbook provides state-of the-art analysis of the private enforcement of competition laws across the globe. Private enforcement of antitrust is becoming a significant component of competition policy laws worldwide; today, more than a hundred jurisdictions have adopted market regimes operating within a framework of competition law, providing a varied base for developing ways by which persons injured by anticompetitive conduct will (or will not) be able to obtain remedies. Written primarily from the perspective of the complainant, the Handbook contributes to the discussion by presenting empirical research on private remedies through unprecedented, detailed and systematic analysis of private antitrust enforcement in the US. The expert contributors - law practitioners in the US and 21 other countries - explain both the law and the realities regarding private remedies as they have experienced them. They provide useful information to law and policy makers contemplating the introduction or expansion of private enforcement and to competition advocacy NGOs, attorneys and others who may wish to support or utilize the tools of private enforcement. By way of conclusion, valuable observations are imparted and recommendations prescribed. This important Handbook will prove an invaluable reference tool for a wide-ranging audience including: international private practice lawyers, law academics and students with a special interest in competition policy, international government officials involved in legislation or regulation of private remedies in countries with competition laws, and economists consulting in competition cases.

The digital economy, broadly defined as the economy operating on the basis of interconnectivity between people and businesses, has gradually spread over the world. Although a global phenomenon, the digital economy plays out in local economic, political, and regulatory contexts. The problems thus created by the digital economy may be approached differently depending on the context. This edited collection brings together leading scholars based in Asia to detail how their respective jurisdictions respond to the competition law problems evolving out of the deployment of the digital economy. This book is timely, because it will show to what extent new competition law regimes or those with a history of lax enforcement can respond to these new developments in the economy. Academics in law and business strategies with an interest in competition law, both in Asia and more broadly, will find the insights in this edited collection invaluable. Further, this volume will be a key resource for scholars, practitioners and students.

This handbook offers detailed descriptions of EU competition law, including mergers and public authorities. Above all, it analyzes and discusses recent decisions of the ECJ and the General Court. Presenting systematically structured and theoretically founded content, the book also includes recommendations for practitioners. Special attention is paid to the scope of penalties and the influence on fundamental rights. Rounding out the book, the conflict between safeguarding confidential information and the effectiveness of private and public enforcement is discussed intensively in the context of the new Directive 2014/104/EU.

The diverse and excellent set of authors assembled in this book sheds light on the continuing and conflicting calls for deregulation and re-regulation of important industries and informs the ongoing, increasingly global, policy debate over the evolving line between regulation and general competition policy. The purpose of this book is to understand the debate and its policy implications, focusing on the traditionally regulated sectors of telecommunications and energy, and comparing approaches in the European Union and the United States. The book also contains contributions that generalize across industries, thus lending relevance beyond the two sectors that anchor the book. Innovatively combining legal and economic views, Antitrust and Regulation in the EU and US will be of great interest to scholars of competition law, international law firms, and competition authorities and sector-specific regulation authorities (federal and state).

Economic analysis plays a pivotal role in competition enforcement. Integrating an economic perspective on merger control with a legal perspective throughout, this is a comprehensive reference work on merger control in the EU. Each chapter includes an analysis of the economic methods that have been employed in merger cases or that can be employed in merger assessment, such as merger simulation and critical loss analysis. Whilst focusing on EU practice, the work also highlights key procedures and and case law across the member states. A comparison with US procedure is also considered. Analysing both substantive and procedural law in detail, this is the most comprehensive work on EU merger control and is invaluable for merger assessment.

An approach to reinvigorating economic competition that doesn't break up corporate giants, but compels them to share their technology, data, and knowledge "Bessen is a master of unpacking the nuances of a complex array of interrelated trends to build a coherent story of how the promise of the democratized Internet ended up under the control of just a few. Read The New Goliaths to see how the forest came to have only room for a few tall trees with the rest of us in the undergrowth."-Joshua Gans, coauthor of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence Historically, competition has powered progress under capitalism. Companies with productive new products rise to the top, but sooner or later, competitors come along with better innovations and disrupt the threat of monopoly. Dominant firms like Walmart, Amazon, and Google argue that this process of "creative destruction" prevents them from becoming too powerful or entrenched. But the threat of competition has sharply decreased over the past twenty years, and today's corporate giants have come to power by using proprietary information technologies to create a tilted playing field. This development has increased economic inequality and social division, slowed innovation, and allowed dominant firms to evade government regulation. In the face of increasing calls to break up the largest companies, James Bessen argues that a better way to restore competitive balance and dynamism is to encourage or compel these companies to share technology, data, and knowledge.

During the past century, intellectual property (IP) law has expanded within and beyond national borders. The field of IP law was once a niche area concerning authors, inventors, and trademark owners. Today, IP law acts as a complex regime of instruments, institutions, and actors that negotiate overlapping, diverging, and occasionally competing public policies on a global scale. As IP continues to expand beyond borders, the instruments and tools utilised for its global protection rely on public international law as the common denominator and unifying frame. Intellectual Property Ordering Beyond Borders provides an evaluation of the most pertinent public international law questions raised by this multidimensional expansion. This comprehensive and far-reaching volume tackles problems such as generalist approaches under the law of treaties; custom and general principles; interfaces between IP and other normative orders, such as trade and investment; and interdisciplinary accounts from the economic, political, and social science perspectives. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

The digital economy is gradually gaining traction through a variety of recent technological developments, including the introduction of the Internet of things, artificial intelligence and markets for data. This innovative book contains contributions from leading competition law scholars who map out and investigate the anti-competitive effects that are developing in the digital economy. Competition Law for the Digital Economy critically evaluates how the digital economy differs from the old economy and the ways in which competition law interacts with other legal regimes of data protection and sector specific regulations. This book also considers the broader issues, addressing the possible remedies to be imposed in the case of restrictions on digital markets. This timely book asserts that whilst the digital economy is currently in its infancy, competition law should play a crucial role in shaping the competitive digital ecosystem. Providing the general perspectives on competition policy and the application of traditional and new regulatory tools for the digital economy, this analytical book will be a key resource for competition law students and academics, while also appealing to practitioners. Contributors include: K. Bania, E. Deutscher, S.Y. Esayas, R.C. Feldman, M.S. Gal, B. Lundqvist, S. Makris, H.K. Schmidt, N. Thieme, Y. Uemura, S. Van Uytsel, J. Vesala, S. Vezzoso, K. Voss

The growing use of private labels in recent years has affected significantly the landscape of retail competition, with major retailers no longer being confined to their traditional role as purchasers and distributors of branded goods. By selling their own-label products within their outlets they are competing with their upstream brand suppliers for sales and shelf space. This unique relationship, and the continued strengthening of private labels, raises important questions as to their pro-competitive effects and possible negative effects.
This book provides an in-depth review of the range of competitive and intellectual property issues raised in connection with private brands in Europe and the US. It examines the development of private labels and their impact on retail competition, then moves on to focus on policy and questions the adequacy of current economic and legal analysis in light of the characteristics of own-label competition, and finally it presents a thorough evaluation of the legal issues in the field, including chapters on horizontal and vertical effects, dominance, mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, copycat packaging and consumer welfare.
The book contains a collection of essays reflecting the debate on the impact of private labels upon competition, investment and innovation in the retail sector. The ideas and arguments underlying the articles have been developed through a series of seminars held in the Oxford Centre for Competition Law and Policy over the last three years. Participants in these seminars have included competition officials, law academics, practitioners and representatives from industry.

This book is the first to empirically examine the role of non-competition interests (public policy) in the enforcement of the EU's prohibition on anti-competitive agreements. Based on an original quantitative and qualitative database of over 3,100 cases, this book records all of the public enforcement actions of Article 101 TFEU taken by the Commission, EU Courts, and the national competition authorities and courts of five representative Member States (France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the UK). The book not only exposes explicit tools in which non-competition interests played a role, but also sheds light on the "dark matter" of balancing, namely, invisible forms of balancing triggered by the institutional and procedural setup of the competition enforcers. Moreover, it contributes to the empirical-legal study of various other aspects of EU competition law enforcement, such as its objectives, the more economic approach, decentralized enforcement, and the functioning and success of Regulation 1/2003.