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Author: Gianluca Faella Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 30
Book Description
Loyalty discounts lie at the heart of the debate on single firm conduct, probably the most controversial issue in contemporary antitrust practice. Under particular conditions, loyalty discounts may have an exclusionary effect. However, they constitute a classical form of price competition, an effective commercial tool and a way to solve coordination problems in the production chain. In the United States, the fear to lessen price competition has led to a very strong presumption of legality of discounts, provided that they are not predatory or bundled. In the EU, the tendency to induce loyalty, if not a mere intent to exclude rivals, is traditionally deemed to be enough to justify the prohibition of the practice. In the paper, it is submitted that the opposite (almost) per se rules prevailing on the two sides of the Atlantic should be set aside. A detailed analysis, based on a suitable price-cost test and a careful assessment of the impact of the practice on the competitive capacity of minor rivals and on the overall degree of competition in the market concerned, would allow to intervene in cases of seriously exclusionary discount policies, while limiting the unnecessary prohibition of effective forms of price competition.
Author: Gianluca Faella Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 30
Book Description
Loyalty discounts lie at the heart of the debate on single firm conduct, probably the most controversial issue in contemporary antitrust practice. Under particular conditions, loyalty discounts may have an exclusionary effect. However, they constitute a classical form of price competition, an effective commercial tool and a way to solve coordination problems in the production chain. In the United States, the fear to lessen price competition has led to a very strong presumption of legality of discounts, provided that they are not predatory or bundled. In the EU, the tendency to induce loyalty, if not a mere intent to exclude rivals, is traditionally deemed to be enough to justify the prohibition of the practice. In the paper, it is submitted that the opposite (almost) per se rules prevailing on the two sides of the Atlantic should be set aside. A detailed analysis, based on a suitable price-cost test and a careful assessment of the impact of the practice on the competitive capacity of minor rivals and on the overall degree of competition in the market concerned, would allow to intervene in cases of seriously exclusionary discount policies, while limiting the unnecessary prohibition of effective forms of price competition.
Author: Miroslava Marinova Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V. ISBN: 9403505710 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
This book examines the treatment of fdelity rebates as one of the most controversial topics in EU competition law. The controversy arose from the lack of clarity as to how to distinguish between rebates that constitute a legitimate business practice and those that might have anticompetitive e?ects, as the same type of rebates could be pro-competitive or anticompetitive depending on their e?ects on competition. This book clarifes the appropriate treatment of fdelity rebates under EU competition law by o?ering original insights on the way in which abusive rebates should be identifed, taking into account the wealth of EU case law in this area, the economics' literature and the perspective of US antitrust law. The critical discussion on the case law is centred on the idea as to whether the as efcient competitor (AEC) test is an important part of the assessment of fdelity rebates and in which circumstances it could be used as one tool among others. The analysis treats such issues and topics as the following: – What motivated the EU Courts to treat fdelity rebates as illegal ‘by object'? – Why has this case law drawn so much criticism from academics and other commentators? – What can we learn from the economic theories of exclusive dealing and fdelity rebates, and whether the strict approach of the Courts can be supported by economic empirical studies? – What is the meaning attached to the notion of an ‘e?ects-based' approach as an expression of the reform of Article 102? – Why is the controversy regarding the treatment of fdelity rebates still a live issue after the Intel and the Post Danmark II judgments? – In which circumstances the price-cost test can be used as a reliable tool to distinguish between anticompetitive and pro-competitive fdelity rebates? – Can we evaluate the e?ect of fdelity rebates without necessarily carrying out a price-cost test? – Can we consider the AEC test as a single unifying test for all types of exclusionary abuses? – What can we learn about the application of the AEC test in fdelity rebate cases from the recent US case law? A concluding chapter provides an original perspective and also policy recommendations on how the abusive character of fdelity rebates should be assessed including an appropriate legal test that is administrable, creates predictability and legal certainty and minimises the risk of errors and the cost of those mistakes. This book takes a giant step towards improving the understanding of the legal treatment of fdelity rebates and understanding as to whether the treatment of fdelity rebates could be e?ects-based, without necessarily carrying out an AEC test. It will also contribute signifcantly to the practical work of enforcement agencies, courts and private entities and their advisors. book's parallel study of US and EU competition law.
Author: Damien Geradin Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In its submission to the recent OECD Roundtable on Bundled and Loyalty Discounts and Rebates (the "OECD Roundtable on rebates"), Korea observed that "loyalty discounts are getting growing attention both academically and practically" and that "this issue was now on top of the agendas of many seminars and workshops on competition law, with many papers devoted to the theme." It then explained that this trend was attributable to the fact that loyalty discounts has become an important marketing tool, which raised several competition issues in the process. While discounts or rebates - this paper will generally refer to rebates - have been used by businesses for centuries to sell greater amounts of products to customers, it is true that the compatibility of rebates with competition law has become a particularly acute issue in recent years. There are several reasons for this. These last few years have witnessed several major court judgments in the European Union (the "EU") and the United States (the "US"), which have been abundantly commented upon, hence explaining the large number of papers and seminars devoted to the subject. But, more generally, the assessment of rebates seems to be one of the most unsettled areas of competition law. In the EU, for instance, the decisional practice of the European Commission and the case-law of the Community courts have been harshly criticized as being unnecessarily strict, following a form-based approach that is poorly in line with economics. While these decisions have been sometimes misinterpreted, it is true that they were generally unhelpful in large part due to the fact they focused on the wrong questions. As a response to such criticisms (and more general criticisms about the manner in which Article 82 EC was implemented), the European Commission published in December 2005 a Discussion Paper, which promotes an effects-based approach to the assessment of rebates. While US courts have generally applied an effects-based approach to the assessment of rebates, the case-law is still unsettled, notably in the area of bundled rebates. This certainly led Korea to conclude its OECD submission by stating that "even in jurisdictions such as the US or the EU which have accumulated a considerable amount of enforcement experience regarding loyalty discounting often do not have a clear analysis method regarding this practice." While this observation is in many ways true, there are, however, encouraging signs that EU and US law are converging, and will increasingly do so, around a set of sound legal and economic principles to assess guidelines. Both the EU and the US contributions to the recent OECD Roundtable on rebates emphasize the importance of relying on objective economic criteria for the assessment of rebates. While the views of the European Commission and the US antitrust agencies still diverge on some issues, there seems to be a consensus that a price-cost test should play an important role in screening rebates that can (i.e., are able to) foreclose a dominant firms' rivals to supply one or several customers. There is also a consensus that such tests should only be a component of a broader test that should also determine whether the rebates in question substantially foreclose the relevant market and, in such cases, whether the foreclosure effect can be compensated by efficiencies. While price-cost tests help determining whether the rebates granted can have the effect of foreclosing competitors because the dominant firm's customers cannot turn to alternative suppliers without incurring substantial switching costs, it should also be demonstrated that these customers represent a substantial share of the market to which equally efficient rivals can turn, depriving them of the possibility to profitably enter and/or expand. Moreover, both EU and US law recognize the importance of taking into account in the assessment process the various efficiencies that can be generated by loyalty rebates and the extent to which they can counterbalance foreclosure effects. Against this background, this paper aims at providing a framework - based on sound legal and economic principles - designed to help competition authorities and courts to separate pro-competitive loyalty rebates from anti-competitive ones. It starts with the widely acknowledged view that in the vast majority of cases dominant firms grant rebates to their customers for legitimate reasons, i.e. not to exclude competitors but to engage in legitimate forms of price competition and to realize a variety of efficiencies, as discussed below. In fact, rebates are not only used by dominant firms, but also by firms without any market power and thus unable to exclude competitors. This paper also takes as a starting point the view - which is recognized in the vast majority of antitrust regimes - that the goal of competition law is not the protection of competitors, but the protection of competition. Hence, rebates that cause less efficient firms to lose market share should not be banned as they lack anti-competitive effects. As will be seen below, these rebates enhance consumer welfare as they ensure that customers are served by the most efficient firms and benefit from their more competitive offers.
Author: Patrick Greenlee Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Consider a monopolist in one market that faces competition in a second market. Bundled loyalty discounts, in which customers receive a price break on the monopoly good in exchange for making all purchases from the monopolist, have ambiguous welfare effects. To analyze such discounts as predatory pricing is incorrect. In some settings, they act as tie-in sales. Existing tests for whether such discounts violate Section 2 of the Sherman Act do not track changes in consumer surplus or total surplus. We present a new test and use it in an illustrative example based on SmithKline that assumes the "tied" market is a homogeneous good. If the tied market is characterized by Hotelling competition, bundling by the monopolist causes the rival firm to reduce its price. In numerical examples, we find that this can deter entry or induce exit.
Author: Giulio Federico Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The antitrust treatment of loyalty discounts remains a highly topical debate in European competition policy. The European Commission has started to move towards a more economic approach to the evaluation of loyalty discounts (or rebates) with the publication of its Guidance Paper on exclusionary abuse in February 2009. Part of the framework put forward in the Guidance Paper was then applied extensively in the decision on Intel in May of the same year. Whilst these developments signal a shift away from the previous form-based treatment to rebates, the General Court's judgment in Tomra of September 2010 has reaffirmed elements of the traditional approach. Moreover, the economic theory of anticompetitive leverage and consumer harm put forward by the Commission in its Guidance Paper and in Intel was not clearly articulated. As this paper argues, in order for the current shift towards a more economic approach on rebates to be more effective and complete, the theory or theories of consumer harm applicable to loyalty rebates need to be spelt out explicitly, and verified against the characteristics of the market in question on a case-by-case basis.
Author: Sean Gates Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Antitrust law has become dominated by economics. With its chief end the enhancement of economic welfare through the preservation of the competitive process, antitrust jurisprudence now seeks to follow consensus economic theory. Antitrust liability rules are thus based on prevailing economic views. But what are courts to do when there is no consensus on the economics underlying particular conduct? How can the courts rationally develop antitrust liability rules when the economic analysis of certain conduct is unsettled? That is the case with loyalty rebates and bundled discounts, through which price rebates or discounts are conditioned on the customer purchasing a certain percentage of its requirements or multiple products from the seller. There is no established framework of analysis for conduct involving rebates. There is no long line of cases. There is no “great weight of scholarly opinion” presenting a consensus view. Economists and scholars simply disagree on when such practices may harm competition. Rebates thus offer a rare window into the development of antitrust jurisprudence in the absence of a consensus economic theory. Existing case law presents three analogies -- exclusive dealing, tying, and predatory pricing. Judicial decisionmaking regarding rebates is thus a study in analogical reasoning. But what is sorely missing from the current jurisprudence are in-depth analyses of the efficacy of these analogies. Fuller examination of the three analogies reveals flaws in each. But this examination also points to a better solution.
Author: Fiona M. Scott Morton Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 79
Book Description
This article asserts and operationalizes the principle that demand contestability determines the competitive effects of loyalty rebates. We urge antitrust courts and enforcers to recognize the construction of a loyalty rebate contract as an act with competitive consequences. These consequences turn on the interaction of three important features of the contract: the discount, the threshold, and the contestable share, all of which are chosen by the incumbent firm. Our analysis shows that the impact on competition is unlikely to be found by applying existing marginal cost rubrics.In place of the fractured analogical reasoning that characterizes American discounting doctrine today, we simplify by using the characteristics of a loyalty rebate contract to calculate one metric - the penalty imposed on the entrant by the rebate contract. Specifically, we measure how much the entrant must lower price on its own units - the burden it faces - in order to fully counteract the financial incentives the rebate contract creates for customers. This “effective entrant burden” measures the extent to which the dominant firm leverages its non-contestable assets into anti-competitive exclusion. The size of this penalty, we assert, makes sense of the divergent holdings of courts confronted with loyalty rebate disputes.
Author: Robert O'Donoghue QC Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1509942971 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 1368
Book Description
“a reference book in this area of EU competition law and a must-have companion for academics, enforcers and practitioners alike, as well as EU and national judges.” Judge Nils Wahl, Court of Justice of the European Union This seminal text offers an authoritative and integrated treatment of the legal and economic principles that underpin the application of Article 102 TFEU to the behaviour of dominant firms. Traditional concerns of monopoly behaviour, such as predatory pricing, refusals to deal, excessive pricing, tying and bundling, discount practices and unlawful discrimination are treated in detail through a review of the applicable economic principles, the case law and decisional practice and more recent economic and legal writings. In addition, the major constituent elements of Article 102 TFEU, such as market definition, dominance, effect on trade and applicable remedies are considered at length. The third edition involves a net addition of over 250 pages, with a substantial new chapter on Abuses In Digital Platforms, an extensively revised chapter on standards, and virtually all chapters incorporating substantial revisions reflecting key cases such as Intel, MEO, Google Android, Google Shopping, AdSense, Qualcomm.
Author: Gianluca Faella
Author: Gianluca Faella
Author: Patrick Greenlee
Author: Miroslava Marinova
Author: Damien Geradin
Author: Patrick Greenlee
Author: Bruce H. Kobayashi
Author: Giulio Federico
Author: Sean Gates
Author: Fiona M. Scott Morton
Author: Robert O'Donoghue QC