Predatory pricing in platform markets: a modified test for firms within the scope of Article 3 of the DMA and super-dominant platform firms under Article 102 TFEU
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines predatory pricing in the context of two-sided digital platforms, arguing that traditional tests based on Average Variable Cost (AVC) may be inadequate for these markets. While predatory pricing by dominant firms is prohibited in both EU and US competition law, the current standards may not effectively capture predatory behavior in platform markets characterized by strong network effects and low marginal costs. The paper analyses cases where cross-subsidization between platform sides had predatory elements and resulted in findings of abuse of dominant position. Given platforms' unique characteristics, it proposes a modified test under Article 102 TFEU for super-dominant platforms and those within the scope of Article 3 of Digital Markets Act's scope. The proposal extends the Akzo test by presuming prices below Average Total Cost (ATC) to be abusive, rather than using AVC, with LRAIC as a proxy for ATC. This addresses the current test's limitations for low marginal cost businesses while allowing for objective justification.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it