This book provides a comprehensive overview of the economic and competition policy issues that buyer power creates. Drawing on economic analysis and cases from around the world, it explains why conventional seller side standards and analyses do not provide an adequate framework for responding to the problems that buyer power can create. Based on evidence that abuse of buyer power is a serious problem for the competitive process, the book evaluates the potential for competition law to deal directly with the problems of abuse either through conventional competition law or special rules aimed at abusive conduct. Peter C. Carstensen's expert analysis uses the policy goal of preserving and protecting the competitive process as a guide, and evaluates competition law and policy found around the world for diverse perspectives. He identifies and evaluates controls beyond conventional competition rules and makes recommendations for competition policy, including focus on limiting the emergence of undue buyer power, strict controls limiting the size of legitimate buyer groups, prohibition in most instances of buyer cartels, and strict standards to bar mergers creating buyer power to provide a set of policies that can constrain the risks of undue buyer power. Competition law scholars, competition law practitioners, staff of competition enforcement agencies, economists interested in competition policy, and agricultural economists interested in market systems will all find this book a strong resource.

This comprehensive book contains case studies on the evolution of competition policy, with an emphasis on merger policy, for seven major US industries that have experienced substantial deregulation in the past forty years - electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railroads, airlines, hospitals and banking. Also included is a comparison of the EU's experience in attempting to bring about competition in the energy, finance, and airline industries. The contributors to the volume, each a recognized expert on the industry examined, explore the positive and negative implications of the substitution of market-oriented processes for historic patterns of command and control regulation. The chapters reveal clear similarities in the economic, legal and public policy issues that have arisen following deregulation of these economic sectors. Together they provide a good basis to discern the consistency of the problems and the relative success of differing responses to these issues over a range of industries going through similar transformation. While taking a basically positive view of the movement away from direct regulation, the contributors identify a number of continuing problems with achieving workable competition in these industries. The thorough analyses presented here will be of great value to law, economics, and political science researchers interested in deregulation, economic consultants advising government agencies or private parties, attorneys who focus on deregulated industries, policy planners at the agencies overseeing these industries, and students in advanced seminars on economic regulation.