Identifying Competition Problems
December 10, 2008, 9.30 - 12.45
Venue: NMa
One of the prime responsibilities of antitrust agencies is to identify competition problems that would otherwise go unnoticed. Different from traditional crimes, such as theft or murder, in cases of abuse of dominance and collusion it is often not obvious, not even to the direct victims, that there has been an antitrust violation to begin with.
A number of competition authorities have recently taken the lead to develop sophisticated methods to scan for antitrust problems. Their approaches build in part on an emerging academic literature that combines insights from monopoly and cartel theory with econometric techniques to develop statistical tests for competition problems. Such methods may focus on structural breaks in time-series of prices, geographical divisions of supply, or specific patterns in bidding sequences. Often, however, competition is stifled in several dimensions, including non-linear pricing parts, quality of service and product innovation, some of which may be hard to analyse.
In this ENCORE workshop, we discuss the state of the art in identifying competition problems, in order to identify challenges for further development in this important set of new tools for competition law enforcement. Patrick Bajari of the University of Minnesota will survey the relevant economic literature, after which we will hear about views and recent developments in the European Commission, The Netherlands and The United Kingdom.
9.30 – 9.45 |
Maarten Pieter Schinkel (University of Amsterdam, Chair) Opening
|
9.45 – 10.30 |
Patrick Bajari (University of Minnesota) Econometric Techniques for the Detection of Competition Problems
|
10.30 – 11.00 |
Miguel de la Mano (European Commission) Econometric Analysis in the Assessment of Coordinated Effects: Opportunities and Constraints |
11.00 – 11.15 |
Coffee break
|
11.15 – 11.45 |
Madeline Buijs (Netherlands Competition Authority) Pointers to Competition Problems: An Integrated Approach |
11.45 – 12.15 |
Matthew Bennett (Office of Fair Trading) Horizon Scanning at the OFT |
12.15 – 12.45 |
Discussion with the floor
|
12.45 – |
Take-out lunch |
Presentation Miguel de la Mano
Registration is now closed.
Date: |
Wednesday December 10 , 2008 |
Time: |
9.30 – 13.00 hrs (including lunch) |
Location: |
Netherlands Competition Authority (NMa) |
Directions: |
Route to NMa |
Patrick Bajari is Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from Minnesota in 1997. Prior to his return to Minnesota, he held positions in the economics departments at Harvard, Stanford, Duke and Michigan. Professor Bajari teaches in the areas of industrial organization and applied econometrics. He has published research in leading economics journals, such as The Review of Economics and Statistics and The Antitrust Law Journal on collusion, differentiated product demand estimation, auctions and methods for the empirical analysis of strategic behavior.
Miguel de la Mano joined the Commission in 2001 and is currently a member of the Chief Competition Economist Team. He carries out economic analysis of mergers and commercial practices by dominant companies and their impact on the competitive structure of markets. He is also responsible for drafting guidelines setting out the Commission's analytical framework in these areas. He completed graduate studies in economics at the Institute for World Economics in Kiel, Germany, and the European Institute at Saarbrucken University, Germany. He conducted his PhD research at Oxford University, UK.
Matthew Bennett is Director of Economics in the Office for Fair Trading. He joined the OFT earlier this year from LECG where he worked on competition policy cases including the Aer Lingus / Ryan Air merger and the recent Bananas Cartel. Prior to that he worked in the UK Communications Regulator OFCOM within the Chief Economists team. Matthew gained his Economics doctorate at Warwick University and completed a Post-Doctorate in Toulouse where he studied the interaction between competition and regulation.
Madeline Buijs received a Master’s degree in economics from the University of Utrecht and a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Amsterdam. She currently works for the office of the Chief Economist of the Netherlands Competition Authority where she is mainly involved in developing new methods to detect collusion based on economic methods and data.
