Good morning,

We hope you are enjoying CompetitionFeed.

Here below you find the most read articles over the last week.

REUTERS

Italy Antitrust fines 'big four' accounting firms total of 23 million euros

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's Antitrust authority said on Tuesday that it fined the "big four" accounting firms a total of 23 million euros ($26.61 million) for allegedly conspiring to divvy up large public consultancy contracts, a statement said. Read More.

Forbes

Unprecedented Battle Looming: AT&T Threatens To Take Trump And DOJ To Court Over Time Warner Deal

The Department of Justice has called on AT&T and Time Warner to sell CNN in order to complete their planned merger. Read More.

The New York Times

Why Blocking the AT&T-Time Warner Merger Might Be Right

The Trump administration is correct in taking a hard look at the proposed takeover, which could discourage competition and hurt consumers. Read More.

ACCC

ACCC won't oppose proposed Essilor and Luxottica merger

The ACCC has decided to not oppose the proposed merger between Essilor International (Essilor) and Luxottica Group S.p.A. (Luxottica). Read More.

CMA

Securing the potential benefits of local authority trading companies

Local authority trading companies (LATCs) can be fairly contentious. Some believe they shouldn’t exist at all; others that they’re the best way to deliver public services; others still that they compete unfairly. The last of those is a complaint sometimes made to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Read More.

Disruptive Competition Project

Digital Assistants: How Artificial Intelligence Competition is Undermining “Hipster Antitrust” – Part II

This post explores in detail the impact of that digital assistant competition on the tech industry and its significant implications for competition policy and antitrust enforcement. Read More.

International Journal of Industrial Organization

Explicit vs Tacit Collusion: The Effects of Firm Numbers and Asymmetries

Luke Garrod and Matthew Olcza

• We analyse firms’ incentives to form a cartel when they can also collude tacitly
• A cartel improves monitoring over tacit collusion but runs the risk of sanctions
• We find cartels are less likely to arise in markets with a few symmetric firms
• This contrasts with the conventional wisdom but is consistent with some evidence
• It also raises questions over the use of structural indicators to screen for cartels. Read More.

NBER Working Paper

How Efficient is Dynamic Competition? The Case of Price as Investment

David Besanko, Ulrich Doraszelski, Yaroslav Kryukov .
We study industries where the price that a firm sets serves as an investment into lower cost or higher demand. We show that dynamic competition leads to low deadweight loss and learning-by-doing causes the various contributions to deadweight loss to either be small or partly offset each other. Read More.

Journal of European Competition Law & Practice

Survey on Vertical Agreements in 2017 – Is the Rigid Application of Competition Law to Distribution Agreements Going to Kill the Bu...

Louis Vogel and Joseph Vogel
Distribution agreements constitute one of the principal areas of application of competition law. Read More.

Visit CompetitionFeed and read more.

Best wishes, CompetitionFeed Team
E-mail: valur@competitionfeed.com

About CompetitionFeed
By aggregating material from over 300 sources and using human and artificial intelligence to pick out the most important articles, CompetitionFeed provides an effective way to monitor all this information. That would be impossible for any single person.

Events and Jobs
Looking for a job or an interesting event to attend? Visit ComptitionFeed.com.