Chillin'Competition

I recently had to devote most of my non-billable work to finishing a few publications (the fact that after a few missed deadlines I was almost under death threat from editors also played a role) and preparing some courses. As if there weren’t better things to do with one’s time…

Anyway, since I did the work, I thought that it could perhaps be useful to post it or refer to it here, both to justify myself and in case any of you might find them interesting or have comments. These “non-working” papers include:

– A paper on “The Double Duality of Two-Sided Markets” which, to a large extent, is a beefed up version of my speech (the ppp is available here) at the Swedish Competition Authority’s Pros and Cons Conference back in November. The editors of Competition Law Journal have kindly offered to publish it, so it will appear there soon. The paper posits that competition law enforcement regarding multi-sided platforms may have not always accounted for the ambiguity of business practices carried out in these settings and attempts to identify the causes at the root of this problem and to propose some solutions. In essence, my take is that multi-sided platforms raise old questions but with renewed intensity, and that this must force us to go back to basics and recall some general principles that we should never lose sight of.

– A presentation on the Cartes Bancaires Judgment (here: Some additional reflections on Cartes Bancaires_Lamadrid ). It’s titled “some additional reflections” because it followed previous interventions at a seminar on the part of Javier Ruiz Calzado (Latham&Watkins; his very good ppp is also available here: Cartes Bancaires_Ruiz Calzado ) and Nicholas Khan, from the European Commission’s Legal Service. It was a privilege to share the panel with them.

– An absurdly lengthy not so succint paper I’ve co-written with my colleague Ana Balcells on cartel evidence in Spain: La prueba de los cárteles en España (Lamadrid_Balcells), forthcoming in JM Beneyto y J Maillo (Dirs): La lucha contra los cárteles en España, Aranzadi, 2015.

– Also, a few days ago the founder of this blog, Nicolas Petit, asked me (with a most kind anticipation of less than 24 hours…) to conduct a case study on the Google investigation at the Brussels School of Competition. It was a very interesting exercise. I only directed the debate asking questions and linking issues together and it was the students who brilliantly taught themselves and arrived to their own conclusions (I’m being nice to them because I told them that suscribing to the blog is a prerequisite for passing, so I assume they’re reading this). The legal issues underpinning the case (which have not always received the necessary attention) are very well-suited to reflect about some basic concepts of Article 102. In fact, Pablo also did this with his students at LSE a few days ago. Just in case any of you is interested in conducting a similar exercise, here is the (very hastily drafted) list of questions I used: Google Case study – BSC_Lamadrid.