Suchergebnisse

In the period covered by this note (early 1994 to the middle of 1995) some signifi cant and interesting judgments have been handed down by the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance on both substantive and procedural issues of competition law, in particular that of the Court of Justice in the Magill case, which deals with the relationship between Article 86 and intellectual property rights. In the legislative field there is now a group exemption on the operation of liner transport services. As regards general problems of enforcement, the Commission's 1993 Notice on Co-operation between National Courts and the Commission1 has provoked a good deal of discussion and a number of commentators and also the Commission itself are now advocating sharing responsibility for enforcement with national competition authorities rather than relying on the direct effect of Articles 85(1) and 86 being invoked before national courts.2

Abstract. Contrary to the conventional hypothesis, the structural elements on the supply side of free product markets are not stable. The variability in the structures of free markets is readily apparent in an appropriate analysis of the emergence, growth, and maturity of free product markets. In this analysis, supply‐side entrepreneurship plays a prominent role—one which is only imputed to entrepreneurship in the conventional specification of market conditions. In order to correct this deficiency in the conventional specification, an alternative specification is summarized in which are treated explicitly the effects of entrepreneurial activity with respect to the discovery and development of economically feasible new products and processes and the choice of and variations in the quality characteristics of the products of individual firms. This indicates that firms can and do influence the stage of development—and hence the related size—of a market and their relative shares of it by new product and process development and the quality of their output. In this way entrepreneurial activity affects particular product market structures.

The article is devoted to competition advocacy as an important component of the activity of antimonopoly body. The specific features of objects, methods and results of competition advocacy as compared with the enforcement of antitrust legislation are demonstrated. The authors analyze the main directions of competition advocacy by the antimonopoly body. It is stressed that such an advantage of competition advocacy as an opportunity of its broad use not connected strongly with the antitrust legislation in force is extremely important for the Russian economy. Recently the Federal Antimonopoly Agency has included competition advocacy in the framework of departmental target programs that makes necessary the analysis of indicators of the targets attainment level.

The period under consideration (mid-1995 to March 1998) was a relatively quiet one for Article 85. Note should be taken of the publication in 1997 of the Commission's Green Paper on vertical restraints in competition policy,1 which is likely to lead to a significant overhaul of a number of block exemption regulations. The existing block exemptions on patent licensing and know-how agreements2 were merged into a new single block exemption on technology transfer.3 Perhaps the most interesting and potentially far-reaching development was the Commission decision in Bayer/Adalat,4 in which the Commission characterised as agreements—and so falling within Article 85—attempts by the German chemicals group Bayer to limit supplies of a range of pharmaceutical products from its wholly owned distributors in other member States to wholesalers there in order to stem parallel exports. This was not an Article 86 case (Bayer was not dominant in the relevant product market), of which refusal to sell is more commonly a feature, and an agreement between manufacturer and distributor/wholesaler which prohibits re-export of the contract goods has long been recognised as falling within Article 85(1). But in Bayer/Adalat the wholesalers never agreed to the (alleged) export ban, and in fact resisted Bayer's attempts to limit supplies both directly and by subterfuge. Nevertheless, the Commission found an agreement between the Bayer distributors and the wholesalers, effectively simply in continuing to deal, the former having committed "an infringement of Article 85(1) by imposing an export ban as part of their continuous commercial relations with [the latter]",5 the ban having "been agreed [sic] as part of their ongoing business relations".6

AbstractWe propose a model of political competition not over policy programs, but over ideologies: models of the world that organize voters' experiences and guide the inferences they draw from observed outcomes. Policy‐motivated political parties develop ideologies, and voters choose the ideology that best explains their observations. Preferences over policies are then induced by the adopted ideology. Parties thus care about winning the ideological battle as it confers an advantage in the electoral arena. We show that in equilibrium political parties always propose different models of the world. This divergence extends to all features of the environment, not just policy dimensions. A lower degree of policy extremism in the past increases the divergence on the policy dimension, thus leading to higher ideological polarization.