ABSTRACT
Pharmaceutical producers got the (non-binding and conditional) assurance that their cooperation aimed at avoiding shortages of vital medicines did not raise competition concerns.2 Information exchanges in matchmaking meetings in which undertakings operating at different levels of the value chain sought partners to ramp up the production and supply of vaccines, were also considered non-problematic.3 The Temporary Framework has now been withdrawn in favour of the all-purpose revised Informal Guidance Notice. [...]subsequently, this runs the risk that we will see informal guidance only in areas where the Commission and national competition authorities are already developing a rich body of decision-making practice. Because it is precisely in non-priority areas where questions unanswered by existing forms of guidance – on, for instance, the application of Article 101(3) TFEU - are most likely to persist. In this final issue of CoRe in 2022, Paul Gorecki discusses price signalling as a form of information exchange, a longstanding concern under EU competition law but one that has attracted only a limited number of infringement decisions.
ABSTRACT
Do regulatory structures and competition laws have a role to play in helping businesses recover from COVID-19? Such policy issues are important, as the pandemic has had a major impact on the competitive capacity of the small and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) sector in Southeast Asia, which accounts for a majority of all operating businesses and employs over 140 million people in the region. Both competition policymaking and MSME policy are vital to the Southeast Asian community. This chapter provides an overview of what competition policy and law is, how it has been administered in the region, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the business operating and competition environment. It also discusses how competition agencies have dealt with the challenges of COVID-19 so far. The chapter concludes with recommendations as to how these two different areas of public policy - those relating to competition, and those relating to MSME development - can work together to support recovery from the pandemic. Rather than proposing the enactment of new laws, it is suggested that there be greater collection of MSME data, and further development of consultative mechanisms with the small firm sector and industry associations, as well as the recruitment of staff with firsthand knowledge of MSMEs. © 2022 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
ABSTRACT
En s'appuyant sur des recherches sur l'économie politique des industries de la musique, sur des entrevues avec des musiciens indépendants sur leurs expériences vécues et sur l'expérience des auteurs qui ont participé à des consultations gouvernementales sur le droit d'auteur au Canada, cet article examine comment le pouvoir de marché des grandes entreprises de musique et leur mainmise sur le processus d'élaboration des politiques par le biais du lobbying ont fait de la réforme du droit d'auteur une approche extrêmement limitée pour remédier aux diverses difficultés auxquelles sont confrontés les musiciens à l'ère des médias en continu. Contre la consolidation et la concentration continues du pouvoir au sein des industries de la musique, nous explorons une étude de cas de Capital City Records de la bibliothèque publique d'Edmonton comme un modèle alternatif qui peut servir d'inspiration pour d'autres initiatives qui défendent les artistes et les utilisateurs. Nous terminons en discutant d'un modèle de gouvernance et d'infrastructure publique basé sur la notion de carrefour qui pourrait servir d'outil pour contourner les dynamiques de pouvoir inégales dans les industries de la musique, faciliter le renforcement des communautés musicales et fournir des moyens de subsistance durables aux musiciens actifs au Canada.Alternate :Using research on the political economy of the music industries, interviews with independent musicians about their lived experiences, and the authors' experience participating in government copyright consultations in Canada, this article discusses how the market power of major music companies and their capture of the policy-making process through lobbying has made copyright reform an extremely limited avenue for remedying the variety of hardships facing musicians in the streaming media era. Against the continued consolidation and concentration of power within the music industries, we explore a case study of Edmonton Public Library's Capital City Records as an alternative model that may inspire further initiatives that advocate for artists and users. We conclude by discussing a commons-based, public-infrastructure and governance model that could serve as a tool to circumvent uneven power dynamics in the music industries, facilitate stronger music communities, and maintain sustainable livelihoods for working musicians in Canada.
ABSTRACT
Companies under investigation for anticompetitive behaviour in breach of the competition rules face heavy fines, high legal costs, loss of future profits and reputational damage. In addition, listed companies also seem to (temporarily) experience negative shocks in their stock market value. This article provides a descriptive analysis of the impact of the European Commission’s press release, announcing an antitrust investigation, on the stock market performance of the companies involved. Furthermore, we discuss the influence of the press release covering the Commission’s decision and accompanying fine. Reviewing four cases for each of these two moments, we conclude that an antitrust investigation or fine can be linked to a substantial negative shock to the stock market value of the companies concerned. While the drop is sizeable and thus clearly visible for almost all companies, the effect also seems to be relatively short-lived. Interestingly, the effects mostly seem more pronounced for the announcement of the investigation than for the fine, with some cases barely showing an effect of the latter. This could indicate that the stock market already accounts for the full effects around the time of the initial announcement. Keywords: antitrust;cartel investigation;impact assessment;stock market performance
ABSTRACT
This article analyses US news media’s coverage of the collision between Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, and an emergent antitrust movement aiming to break up or curb their powers. A study of over 700 articles from 2019 and 2020 shows how news media “frame” this controversy by their selection of storylines, subjects, sources, signs, and solutions. Many stories stress the benefits of Big Tech—the cheapness and convenience of products and services, its importance to the US economy and stock market, and its central role in the Covid-19 pandemic emergency. However, a preponderance of stories supportive of antitrust initiatives seeking to rein in digital monopolists;the narrative of an “antitrust bipartisan alliance” crossing the Republicans/Democrats polarity has become a dominant frame. Yet, the media focus on antitrust legislation and prosecution tends to marginalize more radical proposals for challenging digital corporate power, such as those from the Black Lives Matter movement. Our analysis relates the contested media framing of Big Tech both to inter-capitalist struggles within the communications industry and to a hegemonic crisis in US politics, as an entrenched neoliberalism faces populist challenges from both left and right. © The Author 2021
ABSTRACT
Antitrust law has been here before. About fifty-five years ago, inflation was just beginning to creep up. Political and labor unrest characterized a national dissatisfaction with the status quo. And antitrust enforcers were pressing the law to its edges--and winning. These were just a few of the ingredients that would change US politics over the next two decades. Here, Walter offers a word of caution: tread carefully. To the extent that reformers still want to address concentrated labor markets through antitrust law, they should proceed mindful of reform's fragile political support and potential backlash.
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Vertical integration in health care has recently garnered scrutiny by antitrust authorities and state regulators. We examined trends, geographic variation, and price effects of vertical integration and joint contracting between physicians and hospitals, using physician affiliations and all-payer claims data from Massachusetts from the period 2013-17. Vertical integration and joint contracting with small and medium health systems rose from 19.5 percent in 2013 to 32.8 percent in 2017 for primary care physicians and from 26.1 percent to 37.8 percent for specialists. Vertical integration and joint contracting with large health systems slightly declined, whereas geographic variation in these physician affiliations rose. We found that vertical integration and joint contracting led to price increases from 2013 to 2017, from 2.1 percent to 12.0 percent for primary care physicians and from 0.7 percent to 6.0 percent for specialists, with the greatest increases seen in large health systems. These findings can inform policy makers seeking to limit growth in health care prices.
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The second half of 2021 has seen the aviation industry continue to grapple with the impact of the on-going Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as travel restrictions and similar adjustments have been required in a number of jurisdictions. Key developments included in this article include: – A number of addressees of the European Commission’s (the ‘Commission’) air cargo cartel case, which imposed significant fines on participating airlines, have lodged claims against the Commission seeking compensation as a result of the latter’s refusal to pay interest on fines imposed which the Commission repaid to airlines following the EU court’s annulment of the original cartel decision. – The Commission has closed its investigation into Amadeus and Sabre over their contractual terms governing the distribution of airline tickets in agreements between airlines and travel agents, citing insufficient evidence that the arrangement had restricted competition;and – The seismic impact of the on-going pandemic continues to give rise to a great number of State Aid notifications to various beneficiaries in the aviation sector, with a commensurate uptick in the number of legal challenges before EU courts. As with 2020, Ryanair has continued to be particularly active in challenging these measures. This article summarizes the main developments over the past 6 months and aims to provide the reader with an overview of each of these developments © 2022 Kluwer Law International BV, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
Two crises in 2020 fueled the fire underlying a debate that has been smoldering for years: whether student athletes should be compensated. The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement and drew unprecedented attention to systemic racism permeating society, including college sports that rely disproportionately on Black men risking physical harm to support an entire industry. The Supreme Court's decision in NCAA v. Alston opened the door for some athletic conferences to offer student athletes unlimited education-related benefits and called out the NCAA's business model that relies on not paying student athletes under the justification of amateurism. Alston asserted that the NCAA amateurism model is not exempt from antitrust law, and a scathing concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in no uncertain terms that "[t]he NCAA is not above the law." In the context of the ever-evolving landscape of student-athlete compensation, this Note examines recent changes to the NCAA compensation model and suggests that antitrust law should be used as a vehicle to change the game by correcting racial inequities perpetuated by this business model. This Note asserts that the ball is now in Congress's court and advocates for federal legislation and collective bargaining to empower student athletes to seek the full value of their labor.
ABSTRACT
Over the past 150 years, finance has evolved into one of the world's most globalized, digitized, and regulated industries. Digitalization has transformed finance, but also enabled new entrants over the past decade in the form of technology companies, especially FinTechs and BigTechs. As a highly digitalized industry, incumbents and new entrants alike are increasingly pursuing similar approaches and models, focusing on the economies of scope and scale typical of finance and the network effects typical of data. Predictably, this has resulted in the emergence of large digital finance platforms. We argue that the combination of digitalization, new entrants (especially BigTechs), and the evolution of dominant digital finance platforms-which we describe as FinTech 4.0 and mark as beginning in 2019-2020-brings both massive benefits and an increasing range of risks to growth and broader sustainable development. The emergence of concentration and dominance in digital finance poses challenges for societies and regulators around the world that, thus far, are most clearly evident in the United States and China. Existing regulatory frameworks for finance, competition, data, and technology are not designed to comprehensively address the challenges these trends pose. Instead, we need to build new approaches, domestically and internationally, to maximize the benefits of network effects and economies of scope and scale in digital finance. At the same time, we need to monitor and control the attendant risks of concentration and dominance in digital finance across existing regulatory silos. We argue for a principles-based approach that brings together regulators responsible for different sectors and functions, both overseeing on a functional activitiesbased approach but also - as scale and interconnectedness increase - addressing specific entities as they emerge. This graduated proportional hybrid approach is appropriate both domestically in the United States, China, and elsewhere, as well as for cross-border groups, building on the experiences of supervisory colleges and supervision developed for Globally Systemically Important Financial Institutions (G-SIFIs) and Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs). This will need to be combined with an appropriate strategic approach to data in finance, to enable the maximization of the benefits of data aggregation while constraining related risks of concentration and dominance.
ABSTRACT
Pandemics present two emergencies: a war against a pathogen and an economic recession. Historically, the US has been forced to relax its antitrust enforcement policies during its largest wartime mobilizations in order to urgently produce goods and services needed in the war effort. Likewise, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, companies should have been allowed to collaborate with each other and with the US government to adequately respond to the increased demand for healthcare goods and services. Guidance from antitrust agencies during the coronavirus pandemic suggested a willingness to allow such collaborations, but the guidance lacked specificity. This article suggests specific policies that the antitrust agencies should implement during pandemics in order to give companies confidence that they can legally engage in collaborations that will hasten the production and distribution of urgently needed healthcare goods and services. However, relaxing antitrust laws has historically caused and prolonged economic downturns. Thus, during a pandemic, the federal government should relax antitrust laws, but that relaxation could exacerbate the inevitable economic downturn caused by social distancing policies. Accordingly, this article suggests how the US government could use non-antitrust regulations to mitigate the systemic financial risk created by that relaxation in antitrust laws.
ABSTRACT
The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and State aid. After providing a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist's team, this article surveys some of the main developments at the Directorate General for Competition over 2020/2021. In particular, the article discusses the Commission proposal on the Digital Markets Act, the developments on the State aid response related to the COVID pandemic as well as the Danfoss/Eaton merger.
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PurposeWhile all recoveries are good, some are better than others with regard to their speed and/or magnitude. Many revenue-related key performance indicators (KPIs), such as comparisons to budgets and forecasts that were designed pre-pandemic to assess a hotel's or destination's performance are no longer valid. Therefore, the primary purpose of this conceptual paper is to highlight the need to peg financial-related KPIs relative to competitors' performance during and following a radical market disruption. The secondary purpose of this paper is to summarize advances reported in the literature and in the industry related to competitor benchmarking and accurately identifying competitor sets.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper synthesizes research from disparate sources to offer a series of recommendations to the industry regarding best practices for developing and monitoring revenue-related KPIs during pandemic recovery. Such KPIs will be different based upon hospitality or tourism sector but must be largely founded upon benchmarking off comparable operations.FindingsIndustry disruptions triggered by COVID-19 underscore the need (1) to increasingly utilize competitor-based revenue KPI benchmarks;(2) to have reliable competitor benchmarking data more readily available for use by hotels and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and (3) for both hotels and DMOs to more accurately identify their competitive sets.Originality/valueThe recommendations offered in this paper are anchored with appropriate theories and empirical research;and as a consequence, offer guidance for the industry for KPI formulation during and following the pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and State aid. After providing a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist's team, this article surveys some of the main developments at the Directorate General for Competition over 2019/2020. In particular, the article reviews the economic analysis in the Qualcomm predation case, recent developments in the assessment of vertical mergers, as well as the new "Temporary Framework" that has been developed in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
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This study investigated the role of price elasticity in the asymmetric adjustment of global retail energy prices and in the rent-seeking behavior of retail energy firms. Overall, 58 nonlinear ARDL models were estimated for the period 2004:M12 - 2016M8 using data for gasoline, automotive diesel, domestic heating oil, industrial fuel oil and crude oil markets. The results indicate that global retail energy markets are still pervasively fraught with the problems of rockets and feathers effect and the likelihood of retailers manipulating the tax system to hide rent-seeking behaviors. The results also indicate that there is more likelihood of rent-seeking activities in the markets for road fuels whose demand is relatively more price-inelastic than in the markets for non-road fuels whose demand is relatively more price-elastic, thereby suggesting that differences in market structure could offer a possible explanation for rent-seeking and asymmetric price adjustment in global retail energy markets. These results have far-reaching antitrust and consumer welfare implications, which require regulators and policy makers to interminably monitor the global retail energy markets, especially during periods of economic crisis like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, in order to safeguard the overall social welfare.