When the agreements underpinning Shell’s supply of gasoline and diesel to independent petrol station owners and operators were investigated by the Netherlands Competition Authority, RBB assisted Shell and its legal advisers in responding to theoretical claims that parts of the supply agreements, whereby Shell promised additional financial support for dealers that had to cut petrol prices in the face of competition from rivals, were anti-competitive.

RBB developed an analysis demonstrating that theoretical modelling of the effects of the agreements, prepared for the Authority by an academic, was internally inconsistent and that the conclusions drawn from it did not flow from the imposition of the margin support agreements, as claimed, but in fact followed from other assumptions made in the model.

We then developed a fully consistent version of the same model which showed that under certain circumstances, and with certain assumptions, margin support agreements could indeed have the effects claimed by the Authority. However, using price and margin data on the Dutch petrol forecourt market supplied to us by Shell, we were also able to show that observed market behaviour was, in fact, inconsistent with the margin support agreements having their alleged anti-competitive effects.