Your Weekly Digest | Issue 227

A group of farmers has filed a federal antitrust case against several big agricultural companies, contending the companies worked together to ban e-commerce sales in order to keep prices for seeds, fertilizer and other chemicals artificially high... Read more.

WASHINGTON—Merchant groups are forming a national coalition to campaign for stricter antitrust laws, including measures they hope could force Amazon.com Inc. to spin off some of its business lines. Read more.

On the 18 March, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) adopted revised guidelines on how it assesses mergers. The previous Merger Assessment Guidelines were updated in 2010 and changes were needed to reflect that our economy, the goods and services that we consume and sometimes the way in which we consume them have changed considerably over the past decade. In 2010, for example, the majority of the world’s largest companies were energy companies, and although these remain large, global companies today, it is so far only the world’s largest tech companies that have joined the ‘trillion dollar company’ club. Read more.

Angela Huyue Zhang, author of Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism, discusses the recent antitrust investigations into Chinese-based companies. Read more.

A redacted document showed extremely sensitive information. Google's lawyer accidentally made it public. Read more.

Serge Moresi and Steven C. Salop
This article explains the inherent loss of an indirect competitor and reduction in competition when a vertical merger raises input foreclosure concerns. We then calculate a measure of the effective increase in the HHI measure of concentration for the downstream market, and we refer to this “proxy” measure as the “dHHI.” Read more.

Tatenda Pasipanodya and Anne Marie Knott
The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) is one of the more commonly used measures in the Strategy and Economics literatures. While its principal uses are measuring market concentration or firm diversification, it has been extended beyond that. Read more,

Michal Galand Yossi Spiegel
The excessive pricing prohibition is recognized in many jurisdictions. In this article we use theoretical and practical considerations as well as experience from the implementation of the prohibition to shed light on its inherent difficulties, potential mistakes, and conditions for application. Read more.

Sophie Lawrance, Edwin Bond, Francion Brooks, Matthew Hunt, Helena Connors, Isobel Thomas
This Survey reviews EU competition law developments involving, or relevant to, intellectual property (IP) rights in the period from November 2019 to December 2020. Read more.