Category Management Antitrust Handbook

More than any other area of regulation, antitrust economics shapes law and policy in the United States, the Americas, Europe, and Asia. In a number of different areas of antitrust, advances in theory and empirical work have caused a fundamental reevaluation and shift of some of the assumptions behind antitrust policy. This reevaluation has profound implications for the future of the field. The Oxford Handbook of International Antitrust Economics has collected chapters from many of the leading figures in antitrust. In doing so, this two volume Handbook provides an important reference guide for scholars, teachers, and practitioners. However, it is more than a merely reference guide. Rather, it has a number of different goals. First, it takes stock of the current state of scholarship across a number of different antitrust topics. In doing so, it relies primarily upon the economics scholarship. In some situations, though, there is also coverage of legal scholarship, case law developments, and legal policies. The second goal of the Handbook is to provide some ideas about future directions of antitrust scholarship and policy. Antitrust economics has evolved over the last 60 years. It has both shaped policy and been shaped by policy. The Oxford Handbook of International Antitrust Economics will serve as a policy and research guide of next steps to consider when shaping the future of the field of antitrust.

The advent of e-commerce and the rise of hard discounters have put severe pressure on traditional retail chains. Boundaries are blurring: traditional brick & mortar players are expanding their online operations and/or setting up their own discount banners, while the power houses of online retail are going physical, and hard discounters get caught up in the Wheel of Retailing. Even successful companies cannot sit back and rest, but need to prepare for the next wave of change. In the face of this complexity, it is all the more important to take stock of current knowledge, based on insights and experience from leading scholars in the field. What do we know from extant studies, and what are the ensuing best practices? What evolutions are ahead, and will current recipes still work in the future? This Handbook sheds light on these issues.

Blockchain has become attractive to companies and governments because it promises to solve the age-old problem of mutability in transactions - that is, it makes falsification and recalculation impossible once a transaction has been committed to the technology. However, the perceived complexity of implementing Blockchain calls for an in-depth overview of its key features and functionalities, specifically in a legal context. The systematic and comprehensive approach set forth in this indispensable book, including coverage of existing relevant law in various jurisdictions and practical guidance on how to tackle legal issues raised by the use of Blockchain, ensures a one-stop-shop reference book for anyone considering Blockchain-based solutions or rendering advice with respect to them. Within a clear structure by fields of law allowing for a systematic approach, each contributor - all of them are practitioners experienced with Blockchain projects within their respective areas of expertise - elucidates the implications of Blockchain technology and related legal issues under such headings as the following: technical explanation of Blockchain technology; contract law; regulatory issues and existing regulation in a variety of jurisdictions; data protection and privacy; capital markets; information security; patents and other intellectual property considerations; and antitrust law. Keeping the legal questions and concepts sufficiently generic so that lawyers can benefit from the handbook irrespective of their jurisdiction and legal background, the authors cover such specific characteristics of Blockchain implementation as so-called smart contracts, tokenization, distributed ledger technology, digital securities, recognition of code as law, data privacy challenges and Blockchain joint ventures. Because Blockchain is a relatively new technology still in process and raises a multitude of legal questions, this well-balanced introduction - at a depth that allows non-IT experts to understand the groundwork for legal assessments - provides a solid basis for organizations and their legal advisors in identifying and resolving Blockchain-related issues. Legal practitioners, in-house lawyers, IT professionals and advisors, consultancy firms, Blockchain associations and legal scholars will welcome this highly informative and practical book.

This Handbook will be an indispensable reference work for practitioners and scholars, as well as for those in an enforcement environment.

Category management is a retail practice wherein the products of a retail establishment are divided up into different categories and then managed as if each were a free-standing business. The most popular approach to category management involves outsourcing decisions to a single manufacturer in the category (a.k.a., the "category captain"). Category management and category captain arrangements can benefit competition and consumers where they help to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of retail decision making. However, given their potential to adversely affect competition and consumers, category captain arrangements have attracted the attention of public policy makers, antitrust enforcement authorities, and marketing and legal scholars. At least two types of competition-related concerns are identified for category captain arrangements. One concern is that a category captain will use its role to coordinate competitor behavior resulting in anticompetitive collusion. A second concern is that a captain will use its role to disadvantage competitors leading to anticompetitive exclusion. This monograph focuses on anticompetitive exclusion. Despite expressed concerns for anticompetitive exclusion involving category captain arrangements research offers surprisingly few insights into the issue. The application of antitrust law to category management also continues to remain relatively undeveloped leaving practitioners with little guidance on what is permissible. Given this state of affairs continued effort is required to better understand the nature and competitive consequences of category management and category captain arrangements. The goal of this monograph is to offer this understanding. Chapter 1 offers an extended introduction to the topic. Chapter 2 describes and elaborates on the nature and practice of category management. Chapter 3 then describes the approach to category management found in category captain arrangements. The key sources of competitive concern for category captain arrangements are identified and elaborated upon in Chapter 4. With the antitrust importance of understanding the power of an organization to harm competition, emphasis and discussion is given to the nature and sources of power and influence held by category captains in Chapter 5. This is followed by Chapter 6 which identifies, organizes and describes the types of exclusionary conduct and practices that may be found in category captain arrangements. Managerial safeguards against competitive exclusion involving category captains are then identified, organized and described in Chapter 7. The effects for competition and consumers that can result from competitive exclusion involving category captains are described in Chapter 8. The findings of empirical research on competitive exclusion in category captain arrangements are then described in Chapter 9. A brief conclusion to the monograph is provided in Chapter 10. The monograph is comprehensively annotated with citations in order to serve as a resource for interested readers.