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CAPACITY BUILDING TO THE OFFICIALS OF THE ALBANIAN COMPETITION AUTHORITY

As part of the Technical Assistance project financed by the EBRD, Lear’s team is delivering online trainings to the officials of the Albanian Competition Authority to strengthen their skills and competencies on economic aspects of competition policy. In particular, the topics of the first set of trainings to be delivered in May 2020 are on:
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Our column on Vox “Tech-over: Mergers and merger policy in digital markets”

Lear together with Emilio Calvano looks at the M&A activity carried out by Amazon, Facebook, and Google between 2008 and 2018 (Argentesi et al., 2019b). Over this period, based on publicly available information, Google acquired 168 companies, Facebook 71 companies, and Amazon 60 companies. The question is whether the target companies would have grown to be viable competitors to the acquiring tech giants.
To read more on this article here

LEARTALK DIGITAL MARKETS – PRESENTATION OF THE STUDY

Lear economists discussed, together with practitioners from the private and public sector and academics, on the relevant economic features of digital markets and the challenges they present for merger control.

The presentation (in Italian) is available here

The report on Evaluation of past merger decisions in the UK digital sector is online

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has appointed Lear to carry out a study looking at 4 past merger decisions in the technology sector taken by the Office of Fair Trading, including the Facebook/Instagram and Google/Waze decisions.

The study investigates:

  • the potential competition theories of harm to be assessed when evaluating mergers in digital sectors;
  • whether the assessment in 4 digital merger clearance decisions was reasonable based on the evidence available at the time;
  • whether the outcome of the decision has been detrimental to consumers based on the market evolution following the mergers.

The main findings of the study will be presented during the LEARtalk Digital Markets in Rome on June 13th.

The report is available  here
More info on the LEAR talk Digital Markets  here

 

Paolo Buccirossi at ACE conference 2018

The 16th Annual ACE conference will take place at the University of Bologna from the 15th to the 16th of November 2018.
Paolo Buccirossi will take part in the discussion in the session on Italy Antitrust – Aspen Excessive Pricing in pharmaceuticals and Serbia Antitrust and in the session on Serbia Antitrust -Collusion in the market for sunflower oil.
More details on ACE Program here