Antitrust and competition laws are government regulations that seek to encourage competition by limiting the market power of firms. Some degree of monopolistic or market power has long been a feature of our economies and is most recognisable today through the activities of companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Apple. The concept of market power remains a central idea in fields such as industrial organization, the economics of regulation, competition law and competition policy, yet there is still much debate about how to define it and how to measure it. Antitrust and Competition Policy suggests a new approach for identifying market power and building on it sets out, for the first time, a sound, comprehensive economic foundation for competition law and policy. This framework sheds new light on a range of antitrust violations including the discernment of anti-competitive mergers, abusive practices and restrictive agreements.
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This text articulates a comprehensive theory explaining, for the first time, the economic foundation of competition law and policy.
1. Introduction;
2. Key Economic Concepts; Part I. The Foundation of
Competition Law:
3. The 'goals of competition' debate;
4. The
transaction-cost approach to competition law;
5. Possible objections to the
approach proposed in this book; Part II. Application to Competition Law
Practice;
6. The concept of market power;
7. Controls on the acquisition of
market power;
8. Controls on the prolonging of, or exercise of, market power;
Part III. Application in Specific Sectors;
9. Competition policy and labour
markets;
10. Competition policy and digital platforms;
11. Competitive
neutrality, EU state aid control and industrial policy;
12. The future of
competition law.
Darryl Biggar is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Monash University and is a member of the independent regulatory authority of New South Wales. He is one of the most well-known economists of competition policy in Australia. For twenty years he served as a senior economist at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Alberto Heimler is professor of Economic Regulation at the Italian National School of Government. He is very well known in the antitrust community both at home and abroad, having been for thirty years the chair of the Working Party on Competition and regulation of the OECD. His recent book on regulatory reform, Il Segno più, Come riformare la regolazione a sostegno della crescita, was published in 2021.
