Distinguishing Legitimate Price Competition from Unlawful Exclusionary Behaviour: Reconciling and Rationalising the Case-Law
This paper analyses EU cases on abuse of a dominant position dealing with low cost pricing by a dominant firm to determine: (i) whether they are consistent with each other and the goals underpinning the EU competition laws: (ii) whether any evolution in the case-law can be detected and (iii) what changes can be anticipated in the future and would be desirable to ensure the law’s coherence. In particular, it considers the implications of the judgment of the General Court in Intel which has reignited the debate about the philosophical basis of EU competition law and the question of how ‘abusive’ conduct can or should be identified. The paper concludes that there is a need to rationalise the case law and for the EU Courts to explain more fully the policy underpinning the cases, when it is legitimate to rely on presumptions of illegality in the context of Article 102, how the various types of abuse relate to each other and how case-law under Article 101 can, or should, impact on the development of principles under Article 102. As the Court of Justice will have the opportunity to address many of these issues in the appeal from the General Court’s judgment in Intel, the paper examines some of the important issues which require assessment in that judgment.
The Antitrust Paradox : A Policy at War with Itself
As antitrust specialists would expect, Robert Bork's book The Antitrust Paradox' is an important contribution to the antitrust dialogue. It draws on his scholarly contributions to antitrust law and economics over the past decade and extends his approach to the study of antitrust issues to new areas. As with Bork's earlier work, this book will doubtlessly generate controversy. The book is organized in three parts. Part One is theoretical, setting out the legislative background and the basic consumer welfare model. Part Two, which deals with applications, is the core of the book. Bork successively applies the consumer welfare model and related economic reasoning to mergers (horizontal, vertical, and conglomerate), vertical market restrictions (including price fixing, exclusive dealing, and territorial restraints), and predatory behavior (including the setting of prices, distribution practices, and litigation). Part Three is a summation in which Bork offers views on how the law ought to be enforced and remarks on incentives that encourage enforcement agencies to extend, or attempt to extend, the reach of the law in ways that, viewed with detachment, are often unwarranted. Along the way, Bork discusses and criticizes other approaches to the study of antitrust, paying particular attention to the barriers-to-entry approach. In addition to the book's formal structure, Bork's analyis operates on various conceptual levels, and three types of issues can be distinguished: the statement of the goals of antitrust, the way in which antitrust problems are formulated, and the analysis of the details of specific problems.2 Bork's position on the first of these issues is that while there are many worthy social goals, there are also many public policy instruments. Goal achievement is commonly promoted by matching instruments to goals in a discriminating
La inseguridad jurídica en normas de contratación estatal
It is established by different studies that the issue of government procurement has been marred by several factors, the test objective to publicize these factors, we take as starting point the constant conflict between the branches of government to try and organize this subject; will collect and analyze diverse regulatory and case material in order to achieve evidence and demonstrate the different concepts of constant change that produces excessive regulation of the subject procurement and is in turn causing rapid changes that result in legal uncertainty for our law on the Contract Status.