Suchergebnisse

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the European Union assumes that all large "core platform service" providers pose similar threats to competition and to fairness and thus imposes identical obligations on all of them. The alternative "New Competition Tool," that would have allowed the European Commission (EC) to conduct fact-intensive investigations of markets to design bespoke remedies, has been largely abandoned. The approach adopted contradicts the basic principle that competition policy should be concerned with evidence of adverse effects. The proponents of the adopted form of the DMA argue that ex ante action is required to forestall irreversible harm to competition, but that same logic also implies assessing the risk of harm from excessive regulation—and the DMA contains no mechanism to do so. Given the different underlying economics of different kinds of platform services, including the way some support digital ecosystems involving many firms, a different approach is needed. The EC missed the opportunity to introduce a market investigation tool. The rigid and static framework of the DMA seems like the wrong solution, given the economics of digital markets.

This essay offers a small state perspective on US-China rivalry in the post-COVID-19 era. After tracing the emergence of the "twin chessboards" of big power rivalry, namely, high and low politics competitions, the essay assesses the impact of these competitions on the post-pandemic Asian order, with a focus on Southeast Asia. I argue that while US-China competition has been rising rapidly in high politics (that is, in the military field), the increasing importance of low politics—infrastructure and connectivity development, technology, trade, finance, public health, and other functional areas—is shaping the prospects, pace, and patterns of the onset of Cold War 2.0. The intensified US-China animosity across the twin chessboards is widening the scope of the competition, increasing the number of players, and mounting pressure on all smaller states. Arguably, however, it is also providing these smaller states with more maneuvering space. These developments reshape geostrategic supply and demand in Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the smaller states are developing additional layers of partnerships with actors near and far, thereby broadening their hedging options in an increasingly uncertain and high-stake environment. (Asian Perspect/GIGA)

In the sharing economy, competitively important user data is often controlled by a single platform. This is due to concentration tendencies in the market as well as a platform's gatekeeper function regarding user groups and user data. Presently, a platform only has to grant access to its user data if the refusal to deal is considered an abuse of market power under competition law. The legal requirements in the EU for such a claim are, however, very narrow. Since EU competition law further follows a strict case-by-case approach, it is ill-suited to provide a systematic solution for data access issues. With data becoming increasingly important, particularly in view of Big Data and AI, the question thus arises whether regulators need to step in and provide for a statutory data access regime. In this context, the impact on innovation and competition of mandatory access to data should be carefully assessed. This paper argues that since user data is, in principle, collected by sharing platforms as a by-product without additional substantial investments, a sector-specific statutory data access regime could promote competition as well as innovation.

This article addresses the subject of clientelism with reference to an unprecedented set of data resulting from a survey of 422 municipal councilors in 44 Brazilian municipalities. Our aim was to verify whether a propensity for clientelist behavior was uniformly distributed among the councilors surveyed and, in the event that it was not, to identify factors that could explain any variations. Our analysis revealed that clientelism – understood as the degree of exposure on the part of councilors to voter demands for individual benefits, and the councilors' willingness to attend to such demands by means of informal strategies – varies among councilors. Through a multivariate analysis of data, we concluded that these variations are related, as we expected, to such characteristics of the municipalities as population, poverty levels and political competition, and to such individual attributes of councilors as ideology and position in relation to the executive branch. We also conclude that there is an interaction between poverty and competition: competition seems to be more relevant than poverty to explain the observed variations, and its effect is intensified; the explanatory power of poverty is higher in the context of low political competition.

Diese Untersuchung bietet eine innovative Perspektive auf den Schnittbereich von Kapitalmarktrecht und Kartellrecht. Inspiriert wurde sie durch die Debatte um einen short squeeze/market corner im Fall VW/Porsche. Stimmen in Literatur und Praxis fordern eine Anwendung des Kartellrechts auf Handelsvorgänge mit vermeintlichem Marktmachtcharakter. Die Arbeit löst sich von diesem Einzelfall und legt übergreifend dar, warum das Kartellrecht ungeeignet zur Regulierung von Kapitalmarkttransaktionen ist. Diese These wird – auch unter Berücksichtigung moderner ökonomischer Kapitalmarkttheorien – durch vielfältige Erklärungsansätze bestätigt. Die Arbeit nimmt jedoch nicht nur einen grundlegenden abstrakten Abgleich der Rechtsgebiete vor, sondern zeigt auch kleinteilig auf materiell-rechtlicher Ebene auf, welchen Schnittbereich die einzelnen Rechtsinstrumente des Kartellrechts und Kapitalmarktrechts im Zusammenhang mit Kapitalmarkttransaktionen haben könnten. / »Trading on Capital Markets as a Violation of Competition Law? A Comparative Analysis of Capital Markets Law and Competition Law as Instruments for the Regulation of Behaviour on the Primary Market and the Secondary Market« -- This thesis analyses the interplay between capital markets law and competition law on both an abstract and a practical level. It compares the functions and objectives of capital markets law and competition law. It analyses behaviours in connection with, inter alia, market corners/squeezes and stock issues under both legal regimes. This allows for further insights into the relationship between the two legal fields, their specific role in the legal system and the potential need for reform.

The control of market concentrations is a specific part of the right to competition and incorporates an ex ante assessment of transactions, and thus is the most delicate area of competition law. It directly affects business entities and their activities on the market without the existence of a factual activity or an act that directly violates the market competition. It is obvious from the aforementioned circumstance that the need for a balanced approach of the right to competition in the regulation of market activities is needed. The comparison of the systems that are in charge of controlling the market concentrations between the United States and the European Union, and in this context, the Republic of Macedonia is imposed due to the significance of the United States antitrust system as the first system that set certain criteria for regulating the market concentrations which were followed by other developed legal systems. For this reason, the comparison of the regulation of concentrations is a good way to see the possible advantages and weaknesses of European Union law in this area.

This paper develops a model in which a firm can use price and advertising jointly as a signal of their private choice of quality, whereby quality is endogenously chosen by firms. The monopoly model reveals that there exists a unique equilibrium in which the monopolist chooses high quality but a higher level of advertising compared to the full‐information benchmark. The model is then extended to the case with competition of two imperfectly competitive firms. We find that if competition is not strong enough, then there exists a unique symmetric equilibrium in which both firms choose high quality. The equilibrium outcome shows that both firms will set lower prices and a higher level of advertising as compared to the monopoly case. Interestingly, we find that more competition might lead to a loss of social welfare due to the increasing level of advertising for quality signaling. The numerical results further demonstrate that as competition gets more intense from the monopoly, prices decrease initially, the level of advertising increases, and social welfare decreases, which may make a ban on advertising more recommendable after a certain threshold.

There are three interrelated sources of market power in consumer goods industries—horizontal competition, vertical competition, and sustained management superiority. The important role of vertical competition is poorly represented in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines and that of management is ignored. Longer term, a firm's success as a horizontal and vertical competitor is largely determined by the competence of its management relative to that of its present and potential competitors. The competition agencies must begin to measure the relative management competence of the firms in an industry under investigation for, as the laundry detergent industry demonstrates, the maintenance of supracompetitive returns, the ease of entry, and other outcomes are largely a function of the firms' relative management competence. The article traces how the fortunes of Procter & Gamble and its laundry detergents have ebbed and flowed with the performance of its management from the FTC's investigation of the laundry detergent industry (1973–80) to the present. It also asks what antitrust should do about a firm that had honestly earned its high margins and dominance but whose brands performed no better than far cheaper private label counterparts.

Within any type of system, the actors in the system inevitably compete over resources. With competition comes the possibility of conflict. To minimize such effects, actors often will partition the system into geographic territories. It is against the larger ecological backdrop of competition and conflict that we examine territory formation among urban street gangs. Although previous studies have examined the social and built environment where gangs form, and how the presence of a gang influences local levels of violence, we know little about how competitive interactions are tied to the formation and maintenance of gang territories. We use formal spatial Lotka–Volterra competition models to derive hypotheses about competition‐driven territory formation. By using data on 563 between‐gang shootings, involving 13 rival street gangs in the Hollenbeck Policing Division of Los Angeles, we show that violence strongly clusters along the boundaries between gangs in a way that is quantitatively predicted by the theory. The results suggest that even weak competitive interactions between gangs are sufficient to drive gang territory formation without recourse to other processes or assumptions.

Abstract
We develop a model in which two insurers and two health care providers compete for a fixed mass of policyholders. Insurers compete in premium and offer coverage against financial consequences of health risk. They have the possibility to sign agreements with providers to establish a health care network. Providers, partially altruistic, are horizontally differentiated with respect to their physical address. They choose the health care quality and compete in price. First, we show that policyholders are better off under a competition between conventional insurance rather than under a competition between integrated insurers (Managed Care Organizations). Second, we reveal that the competition between a conventional insurer and a Managed Care Organization (MCO) leads to a similar equilibrium than the competition between two MCOs characterized by a different objective, i.e. private versus mutual. Third, we point out that the ex ante providers' horizontal differentiation leads to an exclusionary equilibrium in which both insurers select one distinct provider. This result is in sharp contrast with frameworks that introduce the concept of option value to model the (ex post) horizontal differentiation between providers.

The interplay of infrastructure supply and demand is of central interest in line with Web 2.0. As the role of customers turns from a service users' role to an information providers' role, the traffic on existing lines increases and, simultaneously, customers' demand for high-quality infrastructure. On the other hand, infrastructure providers carry investment risks but can hardly internalize the value provided for service providers. In consequence, politicians have to think about how to initiate adequate investment incentives. Using a two-equation estimation approach, a direct competition effect (more service competition increases the supply of infrastructure) can be disentangled from an indirect effect (more service competition increases the demand for infrastructure quality and, as a consequence, increases the supply of infrastructure). While the direct investment effect is only partially confirmed, the analysis provides evidence for an indirect investment effect for both fix and mobile infrastructure investments. Taking into account cross effects between fix line infrastructure markets and mobile phone infrastructure markets even broadens the view: While the indirect own-market competition effect is still found, the estimation results confirm the idea of asymmetric substitutability between telecommunication infrastructures.

В статье рассматриваются составы трех групп правонарушений, совершаемых в области конкурентного права Российской Федерации. Первую группу составляют правонарушения, выраженные в форме злоупотребления доминирующим положе¬нием на рынке, а также в виде ограничивающих конкуренцию соглашений или согла-сованных действий хозяйствующих субъектов, т.е. монополистическая деятельность. Вторая группа это правонарушения, осуществляемые путем ведения недозволен¬ных методов конкурентной борьбы недобросовестная конкуренция. Действия ор¬ганов исполнительной власти, органов местного самоуправления, внебюджетных фондов, Центрального банка России, направленные на ограничение конкуренции составляют третью группу правонарушений, рассматриваемых в статье. ; The article deals with three groups of offenses committed in the area of competition law, the Russian Federation. The first group consists of the offense, expressed in the form of abuse of dominant position and restricting competition in 155 the form of agreements or concerted actions of economic entities, that is, monopolistic activity. The second group – the offences is carried out by conducting unlawful methods of competition – unfair competition.Actions of executive authorities, local governments, extra budgetary funds, the Central Bank of Russia aimed at restricting competition is the third group of offenses that are discussed in this article.

This article explains the absence of a race to the bottom in capital taxation by analyzing fiscal competition under budget rigidities and tax equity constraints (fairness norms). We outline a political economic model of tax competition that treats the outcome of tax competition as one argument in the governments utility function, the others being public expenditure and tax equity. In accordance with previous theoretical research, tax competition tends to cause a reduction in taxes on mobile capital and an increase in the tax rates on relatively immobile labor in our model. Yet, our model predicts that governments do not fully abolish taxes on mobile capital. Instead, the government being least restricted by budget constraints and equity norms cuts tax rates to levels slightly below the lowest tax rates of those countries, in which governments are more constrained, where effective constraints are country size, budget rigidities and fairness norms. Analyzing data from 23 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1975 and 2004 we find empirical support for the hypotheses derived from our theoretical model. Adapted from the source document.

Die Entflechtung der Netze von den liberalisierten Bereichen der Energieversorgungsunternehmen (EVU) spiegelt sich in der Staatsaufsicht wider: Die liberalisierten Tätigkeitsbereiche werden dem freien Spiel der Kräfte ausgesetzt und unterliegen im Falle von Marktmacht der kartellrechtlichen Missbrauchsaufsicht. Demgegenüber wird der Netzbetrieb vollumfänglich und ausschließlich durch die Regulierungsbehörden überwacht. Trotz wesentlicher Unterschiede haben beide Formen der Staatsaufsicht die Funktion, unternehmerisches Handeln derart zu lenken, dass ein effektiver Wettbewerb im Energiemarkt möglich ist. Mit dem Ziel der Wettbewerbsförderung wird das Energierecht ständig Reformplänen unterzogen, ohne dass der Verordnungsgeber bereits bestehenden Konkretisierungsaufträgen umfassend nachkommen konnte. Unter Berücksichtigung der ausstehenden Rechtsverordnungen müssen Reformen ein angemessenes Verhältnis von staatlicher Steuerung und unternehmerischer Freiheit beachten. ; Government supervision reflects the ongoing segregation of the distribution networks from the liberalised sectors of the power supply industry: The latter are exposed to full competition and are subject to the control of abusive practices by competition authorities. The networks, however, are controlled fully and exclusively by regulatory authorities. Despite their substantial differences, both forms of supervision are aimed at directing business activities to ensure effective competition on the energy markets. To promote competition, energy law is undergoing constant reform, but the required ordinances are yet to be enacted. New reform ideas should consider the outstanding ordinances and maintain an appropriate balance between government supervision and corporate freedom.