Damien Geradin reaches top position on SSRN

TILEC is proud to announce that in the download ranking of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Damien Geradin now takes the 15th position of law authors in the world, and the 1st in Europe. With an impressive amount of 51 papers, Damien reaches a large audience on a wide variety of competition law issues, such as excessive pricing, remedies, the link between competition law and sector-specific regulation, and innovation and competition law.
In his latest paper on loyalty rebates, Damien proposes a test to separate pro-competitive from anti-competitive loyalty rebates. First, he identifies various areas of consensus on the assessment of rebates, such as the fact that rebates are generally pro-competitive and should hence not be assessed under per-se rules, and that the assessment of rebates should focus on foreclosure. Then, he analyses the so-called 'suction effect test', as proposed by the Commission in its 2005 Discussion Paper on Art. 82 for all-unit rebates, using numerical examples. This test requires competition authorities to identify the contestable share of customers demand, in order to calculate the suction effect of the loyalty rebate on the sales in the market. The suction effect test is criticised for being uncertain, impracticable, and likely to lead to serious mistakes, in a large part due to the difficulties of determining the contestable part of customer's demand. In conclusion, Damien proposes - as an alternative approach - to apply the classic predation test over all units sold by the dominant firm in order to assess rebates.