Competition law serves as an important tool for regulation of undertakings. In order to conduct a competition law analysis, one must first define the relevant market. However, this task is becoming more intricate in today’s digital era, especially in relation to so-called zero-price markets....

The value of sales of an undertaking infringing antitrust law is a key determinant of the size of the fine levied by a competition authority. European competition authorities rely only on the turnover the undertaking receives from the products in relation to which the infringing conduct...

As an overall proposition competition law comprises of rules that are planned to ensure the course of the competition to expand consumer welfare. Competition law has developed at a marvellous rate lately because of the gigantic changes in political reasoning and economic conduct that have...

The European Commission's recent draft Notice describes the use of supply-side substitution factors in defining relevant markets for the application of competition law. Expanding a defined market to include goods not substitutable on the demand side, based on the competitive strength of a broad...

The Treaty of Rome, whose eighty-fifth article forbade agreements with the purpose of fixing prices or stifling competition, served as the first vehicle for the introduction of competition law into the Economic Community of Europe. The European Competition Commission was given guidance in using...

Whilst the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft is yet to be notified to the European Commission, once notified it will certainly require a substantial competition law assessment. This article discusses the Commission’s decisional practice relating to market definition in gaming...

Digital advertising is the economic backbone of much of the Internet. But complaints have recently emerged from a number of quarters alleging the digital advertising market is monopolized by its largest participant: Google. Most significantly, a lawsuit first filed by the State of Texas and 17...

Roughly a year into control of the federal antitrust agencies, President Biden’s antitrust team is turning its attention to policies and enforcement practices. They seem poised to start, as antitrust so often does, with market definition. This is an appropriate target for review but also...

Modern antitrust law has come under intense criticism in recent years, with a bipartisan chorus of complaints about the power of technology and internet platforms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. A fundamental issue in these debates is how to define the “market” for the purposes...

The European Commission sought public comment on a revision of its Notice on the definition of the relevant market. Among other things, this contribution advises the Commission to: acknowledge the analytic purpose served by the relevant market in competitive assessment; apply the hypothetical...

Monopolization, in the United States, and abuse of dominance, in the European Union, embody different philosophies about how best to police single firm conduct in competition law. Surprisingly, their disagreement ends at market definition. Both doctrines define relevant markets by similar...

Competition law needs to be able to rely on its most fundamental analytical tools in order to properly carry out competitive assessments. This includes market definition as the first step in virtually any competition case. And this also holds true in digital markets. Market definition has risen...

Surging interest in antitrust enforcement is exposing, once again, the difficulty of defining relevant markets. Past decades have witnessed the invention of many tests for defining markets, but little progress has been made, or even attempted, at reconciling these different tests. Modern market...

A new era is dawning for market definition under EU competition law. It is being rung in by five distinct developments that, together, foreshadow the future of the relevant market as a tool of competition law. A plethora of policy reports on digital markets have made recommendations for...

Market definition is a core concept of competition law in the European Union, the United States and Brazil. The present contribution first surveys the general approach to market delineation in these three jurisdictions. Against this background, it then embarks on a discussion of market...

The article addresses the role market definition can play for EU competition practice in the platform economy. The focus is on intermediaries that bring together two (or more) groups of users whose decisions are interdependent and which therefore are commonly referred to as “two-sided...

Despite its vital role in the modern marketplace, attention has largely escaped the notice of the antitrust community. Existing discourse exhibits a variety of misconceptions and flawed prescriptions. One example is the widely held notion that attention markets necessitate two-sided platform...

Competition in many important industries centers on investment in intellectual property. Firms engage in dynamic, Schumpeterian competition for the market, through sequential winner-take-all races to produce drastic innovations, rather than through static price/output competition in the market....

The orthodox view of market definition in antitrust cases is that the same principles of market definition should apply at all stages of an antitrust analysis, and, in particular, that markets should be defined for virtually all purposes by reference to demand-side substitutability. Commentators...

We examine how different pass-through rates, from input- to final consumer prices, and different vertical contracts affect upstream market definition. Our theory model predicts that, under reasonable conditions, higher pass-through rates lead to definitions of larger upstream markets. Data from...

Recent literature has shown that the existence of supply and demand-side non-generic complementarities ("demand-side linkages") within ecosystems raises questions about the pertinence of defining a single relevant market comprising substitute products ("substitutability approach"). However,...

An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level...

An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level...

Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for...

Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of large horizontal mergers are cleared by antitrust authorities unconditionally. The presumption seems to be that efficiencies from these mergers are sizeable. We calculate the compensating efficiencies that would prevent a merger from harming consumers for...

EU Merger Control Regulation No 4064/89 tended to rely on a dominance test, based on the market share of undertakings, to indicate the level and potential changes in market power. The use of such in differentiated product industries is questionable. New EC Merger Regulation No 139/2004...

The American Supreme Court decision in Ohio v. American Express (AMEX) will shape the future of US antitrust enforcement on multi-sided platforms. In a controversial landmark ruling, both the Court's majority and minority battled over definitions of relevant markets in the complex industry of...

This Essay stresses the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Ohio v. American Express Co. (Amex) for the “Big Tech” (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google) and its pertinence to the current antitrust battles facing the four companies. After bringing up the concepts of...

With this submission, I would like to take the opportunity to respond to the European Commission's call for feedback on the evaluation of the Market Definition Notice. My comments mainly focus on the relevance and coherence of the Notice as two of the five evaluation criteria listed by the...

Event studies are an analytical tool used in a wide range of circumstances to empirically assess the economic or financial impact of unexpected events or the release of new information. This article briefly describes their use in analyzing natural experiments to inform geographic market...

This paper questions whether markets need contain products that are direct substitutes for consumers. It shows that there are many instances where markets consist of products that are not direct substitutes, and those which consumers cannot directly use or are at different functional levels in...

The geographical definition of markets is a crucial challenge for economists. With the availability of multiple tools to compare prices, the idea of market definition is entering a new era as it infiltrates the digital sphere. Since December 1st, 2013 the market transparency unit of the Federal...

Telecom companies are a frequent target of antitrust investigations in Russia. In an industry where services tend to become more and more complex and companies actively invest in diversifying their businesses, the antitrust authority in most of its telecom cases has chosen to define markets...

Die Theorie mehrseitiger Marktplätze hat sich seit den ersten Arbeiten von Rochet/Tirole (2003), Evans (2003) und Evans/Schmalensee (2007) und ihrer Übertragung auf Medienmärkte durch Dewenter (2006) und Dewenter/Haucap (2009) zur Analyse von Plattformmärkten im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs...