Are Merger Control and Article 82 EC in the Same Market? - The Assessment of Mergers Which Facilitate Exclusionary Conduct under EC Merger Control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In its judgments in Tetra Laval and GE/Honeywell, the Court of Justice of the European Communities distinguished between mergers which directly lead to a significant impediment to competition (SIEC) and mergers which facilitate exclusionary conduct, thereby leading to a SIEC in the medium-term. When assessing the latter 'behavioural' type of mergers, the European Commission, according to these judgments, has to take into account the diminishing effect of two deterrents on the incentive of the merged entity to adopt the alleged exclusionary behaviour: first, an ex post use of Article 82 EC against the exclusionary conduct and, second, behavioural commitments by the merging firms not to engage in the practice, which may be attached as obligations to the merger decision. This article first analyses which merger scenarios fall into the behavioural category. It then discusses in which of these situations Article 82 EC and behavioural commitments are effective deterrents and thus substitutes for a prohibition of the merger. The article advocates that behavioural commitments are always preferable to reliance on Article 82 EC. It finally supports the jurisprudence by the Court that the same standard of proof should apply for all types of mergers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".