Author Archive
XIV Curso de Derecho de la Competencia – Madrid, 14 January 2011
As every year, the Instituto de Estudios Bursatiles (IEB) and the Universidad Complutense in Madrid organizes a full course in EU competition law from January 2011 onwards (see link at the end of this post).
I have been invited to give one of the first lectures and again, it is a great honour to be part of this venture.
As you will notice, Luis Ortiz Blanco is the driving force behind this programme. Alfonso assistst him and also takes a prominent part in the programme.
The Distance between Brussels and Paris
… seems far bigger than 300 kilometers. See press article at the end of this post.
What constitutes almost standard lobbying practices in Brussels is perceived in Paris as a large-scale conspiracy from the private sector.
The Canard Enchaîné reports that the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Paris has arguably (1) sponsored a biased study on fines (and their alleged excessive level); and (2) invited a Judge of the Paris Appeals Court to a secret meeting, in an attempt to persuade him that some recent investigation techniques of the French Autorité de la concurrence are illegitimate.
In reading this, and in particular (2), I realize that we in Brussels are possibly a little too lenient and naïve in relation to lobbying strategies in competition matters. Of course, (1) raises no ethical issues, as long as the ICC sponsoring is made public. However, secret attempts to influence judges and officials are almost akin to corruption practices, and deserve to be fiercely combated.
New Paper on SSRN
Damien Geradin and myself have just posted a new paper on ssrn. This paper is work in progress. It is entitled “Judicial Review in European Union Competition Law: A Quantitative and Qualitative Assessment“. The paper tries to be a little innovative, in providing an empirical assessment (numbers and stats) on judicial review. As usual, comments are most welcome.
For regular users of ssrn, please note that hardcopies of papers posted on ssrn.com will soon be made available, and will cost a little less than 10$.
Patent = Monopoly
Many antitrust cholars are reluctant to equate an IPR with a monopoly. This is because, under conditions of equal access to capital and investments, any firm can also benefit from the protection of IPRs, and challenge the monopoly holder with innovative, IPRed products/services.
Our supreme judges in Luxembourg seem however to be a little less cautious. At para 64 of C-468/06 to C‑478/06, Sot. Lélos kai Sia EE and Others v GlaxoSmithKline AEVE, [2008] ECR I-7139, the Court of Justice held that:
“a medicine is protected by a patent which confers a temporary monopoly on its holder, the price competition which may exist between a producer and its distributors, or between parallel traders and national distributors, is, until the expiry of that patent, the only form of competition which can be envisaged“.
This wording is unfortunate. The Court seems unaware of the fact that within a same relevant market, there can be competition amongst various patented products.
(Image possibly subject to copyrights: source here)
Belgian Competition Day
My way of celebrating the Belgian competition day: I am off to France for the day.
I’ll be presenting my recent papers to Frederic Marty and his fellows from GREDEG (in Nice Sophia Antipolis).
In addition, I have been told I would have the opportunity to meet a legend of French competition economics, Prof. Michel Glais.
Cost(e)s
Two important clarifications:
- In reading students dissertations, i keep being confronted with the erroneous view that a sunk cost is almost necessarily a fixed cost. This is simply untrue: when firms hire additional staff to increase their production scale, they incur training investments, which are sunk, variable costs.
- Also, students apparently fail to understand why marginal costs typically increase. This is because contrary to what is often said, firms face in the long term decreasing returns: diminishing productivity, costly access to input when quantities purchased increase, etc. (also, in the long run, additional fixed costs must be incurred)
(Image possibly subject to copyrights: source here)
New BSC Module starting on Friday
So far so good. The first BSC seminars were a great success. Simon Bishop (and B. Durand) are truly great speakers.
As some of you may have seen, we have decided to offer the BSC seminars on a modular basis. Because we are capacity constrained (we already have a good bunch of students), we can only accomodate a few registrations.
The next seminar is starting this Friday. J. Ysewyn and E. Sakkers will teach the law and econs of cartels for 15 hours.
For more info, please contact Pierre Sabbadini at psa@vbo-feb.be
AmCham
There’s only a few excellent speakers on the AT conference circuit. I though I knew most of them.
At yesterday’s Amcham annual conference, I had the great pleasure to meet Bill Batchelor (Baker McKenzie).
Bill is certainly one of the best speakers I met in the past months. Lively, funny and to the point. He made an excellent presentation on a very complex, and possibly borying, subject, i.e. tying and rebates.
I attach his slides below.
Bill Batchelor – AMCHAM – TYING REBATES
(PS: for my part, I had the difficult task of delivering a talk just after him. I talked about tying-law post Microsoft. A paper, that I am co-writing with my assistant Norman Neyrinck, will shortly be released on this website).
Teaser
I attach the slides of our ppt. presentation on judicial review in competition law cases (delivered at the GCLC annual conference last week). A paper will shortly be posted on ssrn.
Slides DG – JUDICIAL REVIEW IN EUROPEAN UNION COMPETITION LAW
Chillin'Competition 
