Vitaly Pruzhansky was a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Competition Policy in Brussels which took place on 7-8 of December 2011. He spoke about recent developments in the Russian competition law and increasing role of economic analysis in competition investigations. For more information see here

Francesco Rosati will chair a panel on the assessment of information exchanges between competitors at the forthcoming conference Competition Summit 2011, on 1 and 2 December in Brussels. The speakers on the panel include Geoffrey Goh of Star Alliance, Thomas Gohram of Procter & Gamble and Franck Rohard of SFR.

On 26 October, the Office of Fair Trading unconditionally cleared the acquisition of the online bookseller The Book Depository by Amazon.   The OFT’s investigation focused on the strength of the competitive constraint exerted by The Book Depository on Amazon, both through The Book Depository’s own website and through The Book Depository as a seller on the Amazon Marketplace.  The OFT found that there was limited pre-merger competition between Amazon and The Book Depository’s own website and that competition within the Amazon Marketplace would continue to be strong post-transaction.   RBB advised Amazon during this investigation, working alongside Clifford Chance.

Derek Ridyard spoke at the GCR Law Leaders Europe 2011 Conference which took place in Brussels on 15 November.  Derek spoke on the economics of Article 102 enforcement.  For more information see http://www.globalcompetitionreview.com/events/1317/law-leaders-europe-2011/

Senior economists from RBB presented two papers at this year’s Competition Law, Economics and Policy Conference, which was organised by the South African Competition Commission, the Competition Tribunal, the University of Johannesburg and the Mandela Institute.  It was held on 4 and 5 October 2011 in Johannesburg. Bojana Ignjatovic presented “Exporting at a discount: collusive dumping or oligopolistic competition?” (co-authored with Simon Baker) and Andrew Swan spoke on “Developments in Unilateral Effects Analysis: Price Pressure Tests” (co-authored with Richard Murgatroyd).

On 15 September 2011 RBB held a seminar at the UK Office of Fair Trading presenting the findings of a recent report on the Policy Impact of Conjectural Variations. Many standard economic models have the weakness of assuming that firms do not consider how rivals will react to their actions; conjectural variations represent one possible approach to incorporating such rival responses into these analyses. The report considers the usefulness of a conjectural variations approach, in particular with respect to the empirical estimation of market power and firm conduct, simple unilateral effects price pressure tests and coordinated effects.

Downloads (.pptx)
> Intoduction and coordinated effects
> Empirical estimation of market power and firm conduct
> Unilateral effects