Competition and market regulation (2235.YR.015464.1)

General information

Type:	OPT	Curs:	3	Period:	S semester
ECTS Credits:	3 ECTS

Teaching Staff:

Group	Teacher	Department	Language
Year 3	Gianandrea Staffiero	Economía, Finanzas y Contabilidad	ENG

Students are expected to be familiar with basic mathematics and microeconomics tools.

Competition and Market Regulation is a course that allows students to understand the rationale of policy and regulatory actions with respect to their stated goals.
Since Adam Smith's seminal work, economists and social scientists in general have been thinking about the conditions needed to ensure that markets contributes to enhance the overall welfare of our societies - the "total surplus" - in the language of economics.
Students will become familiar with the concrete problems and dilemmas that competition authorities and regulators face. They will also learn in which circumstances firms get real opportunities incentives to innovate and compete or, on the contrary, entry barriers, flawed regulations and abusive conduct hinder competition.

At the end of the course, students should be able to:
1. Demonstrate knowledge about the rationale and objectives of competition policy
2. Understand how to apply economics to analyse strategic interactions among firms and the competitive effects of mergers
3. Discuss competition cases involving abuse of dominance, collusion and exclusionary conduct

1. The role of competition policy 1.1 Competition and welfare. 1.2 Sources of market power. 1.3. Oligopolistic competition

2. Strategic behaviour 2.1 Barriers to entry 2.2 Competition effects of regulation

3. Merger regulation 3.1 Market definition 3.2 Unilateral and coordinated effects 3.3 The efficiency defence

4. Vertical relationships 4.1 Vertical integration 4.2 Transaction costs 4.3 Double marginalisation 4.4 Vertical restraints

5. Abusive conduct 5.1 Predatory pricing 5.2 Tying and bundling 5.3 Most preferred nation 5.4 Resale price maintenance

6. State Aid 6.1 Rationale for State Aid regulation 6.2 EU approach 6.3 Case studies (airlines and/or other examples)

7. Behavioural insights and regulation 7.1 Bounded rationality and behavioural bias 7.2 Applying behavioural insights in utilities and financial markets

8. Competition policy in practice 8.1 US and EU approaches 8.2 The Microsoft case 8.3 The attempted GE-Honeywell case

Lectures will be delivered in power-point slides, with references to the textbook and additional sources.
They will include economic models presented with case studies, graphs and equations. While some reasonable familiarity with these tools is expected, the course will not be overly "technical" and it will allow all students to interpret the content of the course, irrespectively of their disciplinary backgrounds. Importantly, students should never hesitate to ask the instructor for additional help and clarifications on the materials presented.
Students are expected to participate actively, engage with the questions posed by the instructors and by other fellow students, and share their points of view and doubts in the classroom. They will also have the opportunity to deliver presentations on selected topics.

ASSESSMENT BREAKDOWN

The main references for this course are:

- Competition Policy. Theory and Practice, by Massimo Motta, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
- Industrial Organization: A Strategic Approach, by Jeffrey R Church and Roger Ware, McGraw-Hill, New York, USA

Additional materials used during the course can be found in:

- Exclusionary practices, The economics of abuse of dominance and monopolisation, by Chiara Fumagalli, Massimo Motta and Claudio Calcagno, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
- Cases in European Competition Policy, by Bruce Lyons (eds), Cambridge University Press, UK

Articles, case studies and other references will be indicated during the course.

Group	Teacher	Department
Year 3	Gianandrea Staffiero	Economía, Finanzas y Contabilidad