Interrelationship between Economic Theory and Competition Policy

Abstract

Legal uncertainty is one of the most serious problems of the antitrust law that is caused by the way the law is enforced in different countries, the way competition policy has developed, and its underlying economic theory. Legal uncertainty reveals itself in the absence of a uniform goal of competition policy both at the level of the underlying economic theory, and at the level of antitrust authorities. In its turn, the way competition policy has developed, and the way it is implemented in different countries affect economic theory in general and the definition of competition in particular. It was shown that the goals of competition policy not only fail to correspond to the ones it was created for, but contradict them. It might have been caused by the emergence of the underlying economic theory at some point in the history of competition policy, and by the influence of other economic policies on the goals of competition policy. The article offers an analysis of competition policy from the historical perspective that allows to identify new aspects of the key problems of competition policy. In particular, the article reviews the issue of competition as a market structure, as a behavior of a company in the market, and as an outcome of some behavior of a company in the market. These approaches to the definition of competition do not always comply with each other and sometimes are contradictive. The issue of a contradiction between the rule of law and rule of reason approaches is also touched upon.