Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Competition and ordoliberalism

As a result of my fruitful and interesting research stay at the University of Freiburg and the Walter Eucken Institute I have been working on a paper entitled "Competition and Buyer Power through an Ordoliberal Lens". 

The paper submits that Ordoliberalism is a German school of economic thought that advocates regulating the free market economic based on a set of state imposed rules guaranteed by the economic constitution to impose a competitive order in society. It proposes an alternative method to pure laissez-faire and state planned economy for the better regulation of the market economy by having as goals the protection of the competitive process and individual freedom. In this article I submit that ordoliberalism, an indigenous European competition policy, is an adequate economic and analytical tool to base the practice and decision making of competition law and, in particular, for the regulation of buyer power. My aim is twofold: contribute to the discussion on what ordoliberalism is in general and in particular concerning competition policy, and offer a new perspective on an ordoliberal-oriented competition policy for the treatment of buyer power.

If you are interested in reading it, you can find the current version available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2579308


If you have any comments/suggestions, I will be very happy to receive them!