In this paper we analyse the role of superior bargaining power in competition law and policy in the agri-food value chain. Conventional approaches to competition law based on a neoclassical price theory perspective tend to neglect or to stay opaque on the role of bargaining power in competition law. However, national competition authorities and national legislators seem to be less biased by specific theoretical approaches and have increasingly engaged with the application of the concept of bargaining power in competition law. In this paper we discuss both positions and set a general theoretical framework, the global value chain approach, to better understand the interactions between suppliers and retailers in the food sector. Finally, we observe the framing of new tools of competition law intervention at national level, in order to deal with situations of superior bargaining power in specific settings related to the food value chain.

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Digital technologies and modular production methods have led to the emergence of a new generation of global leaders which cement their market position by orchestrating digital platforms and ecosystems of complementors, which offer them new ways to create and capture value that often transcend the boundaries of existing sectors. Their business models, built on intangibles such as software code and access to data, support expansion that is both breathtakingly rapid and effectively costless. With capital markets all too willing to invest in these firms’ growth, and regulators unable to rein them in, these firms have been able to accumulate unprecedented power and wealth, with profound implications for competition, the economy, and society itself. This special issue confronts the challenge of regulating platforms and ecosystems head-on, revisiting the economic, strategic, and legal foundations that enable us to detect and redress issues of dominance and competition and address questions of the appropriate conception of and limits of the law. The papers included cover topics including the true nature of competition with an emphasis on dynamics and innovation, new approaches for legal and economic analysis including the alternatives for the “welfare criterion” and the protection of sunk investments, the approaches to take on tech mergers and acquisitions, the virtues and limits of self-regulation, the potential for radical breakups of Big Tech, and the issues of data, when privacy protection and competition steer us in different directions. Contributors also weigh up the case for regulatory intervention, the practical challenges involved, and the future state that we hope such actions will bring about.

The paper explores the competition dynamics of the global seed market. It documents the growth strategies of the major seed companies, in particular their M&A activity and their reliance on complex intellectual property strategies in order to offer a one stop shop solution to farmers. Recent merger activity in this sector (the Monsanto bid to buy Syngenta, the DuPont and Dow merger deal, ChemChina's bid to buy Syngenta) illustrates its rapid transformation from an already concentrated industry to a tight oligopoly on a global scale. The increasing global consolidation of this industry raises new challenges for competition law enforcement authorities dealing with the emergence of new powerful actors at the factor of production (input) level, in view of the broader concerns animating public policy in the food sector and the existence of a nexus of international commitments for biodiversity, sustainability, the right to food etc. By exploring this under-studied but fascinating area of competition law enforcement we open the debate over the inclusion of broader public interest concerns in competition policy and the consideration of its distributive impact from a global perspective.

The spread of non-standard forms of work, including platform work, has created some friction between labour law and competition law, in particular concerning the collective bargaining of self-employed workers. This article aims to suggest a different, complementary rather than antagonistic, relationship between competition law and labour law. It initially explores the legal construction of the antagonistic relation between labour law and competition law, which is based on the conceptualisation of the two areas of law as separate and isolated legal fields. It explains that such conceptualisation is problematic as it leads to the risk of fundamental conflicts between the two disciplines and some uncertainty as to their respective scope, with the result that the level of labour protection may suffer. This calls for breaking the dichotomy and for ensuring a continuum of protection for various forms of labour, under both labour law and competition law. It thus puts forward concrete suggestions as to the strategies to be followed in order to achieve this goal.

In a world marked by financial instability, limited growth, rising inequality, deteriorating environment, growing corporate consolidation, and political turmoil, calls are made to shift the dominant competition law paradigm towards new directions. These may bring competition law beyond its usual comfort zone of assessing business, or government, practices from the point of view of their effect on prices, output and, more broadly, on consumer welfare. Competition law is seen as a tool to be used in various circumstances in order to 'correct' market as well as non-market (e.g. government) failures, that result from restrictions of competition, to the extent that these affect social welfare. These failures may relate to the protection of personal data and privacy, the protection of the environment, the promotion of social mobility, the harnessing of disruptive innovation, or the mitigation of technology risks. Some go even further and argue that competition law may well be employed in order to preserve a number of other 'values' of social justice, thought to be intrinsic in democratic capitalism and the liberal order, and to which competition law should be sensitive. By putting forward the model of 'polycentric competition law' and by explaining how this compares with the mainstream 'monocentric' vision that has prevailed so far, the study aims to unveil and portray the rites of passage in this transition, and to explore the liminal condition of modern competition law.

The recent controversy on the intersection of competition law with the protection of privacy, following the emergence of big data and social media is a major challenge for competition authorities worldwide. Recent technological progress in data analytics may greatly facilitate the prediction of personality traits and attributes from even a few digital records of human behaviour.There are different perspectives globally as to the level of personal data protection and the role competition law may play in this context, hence the discussion of integrating such concerns in competition law enforcement may be premature for some jurisdictions. However, a market failure approach may provide common intellectual foundations for the assessment of harms associated to the exploitation of personal data, even when the specific legal system does not formally recognize a fundamental right to privacy.The paper presents a model of market failure based on a requirement provision in the acquisition of personal information from users of other products/services. We establish the economic harm from the market failure and the requirement using the traditional competition law toolbox and focusing more on situations in which the restriction on privacy may be analysed as a form of exploitation. Eliminating the requirement and the market failure by creating a functioning market for the sale of personal information is imperative. This emphasis on exploitation does not mean that restrictions on privacy may not result from exclusionary practices. However, we analyse these in a separate study.Besides the traditional analysis of the requirement and market failure, we note that there are typically informational asymmetries between the data controller and the data subject. The latter may not be aware that his data was harvested, in the first place, or that the data will be processed by the data controller for a different purpose or shared and sold to third parties. The exploitation of personal data may also result from economic coercion, on the basis of resource-dependence or lock-in of the user, the latter having no other choice, in order to enjoy the consumption of a specific service provided by the data controller or its ecosystem, than to consent to the harvesting and use of his data. A behavioural approach would also emphasise the possible internalities (demand-side market failures) coming out of the bounded rationality, or the fact that people do not internalise all consequences of their actions and face limits in their cognitive capacities.The paper also addresses the way competition law could engage with exploitative conduct leading to privacy harm, both for ex ante and ex post enforcement.With regard to ex ante enforcement, the paper explores how privacy concerns may be integrated in merger control as part of the definition of product quality, the harm in question being merely exploitative (the possibility the data aggregation provides to the merged entity to exploit (personal) data in ways that harm directly consumers), rather than exclusi...

efficiency) advances that if the magnitude of the gains from moving from one state of the economy to another is greater than the magnitude of the losses, then social welfare is increased by making the move even, if no actual compensation is made 12. According to Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, an outcome is efficient if those that are made better off can, potentially, compensate those that were made worse off, with the resulting outcome still being Pareto optimal. The winners should, in theory, be able to compensate the losers, but there is no requirement that compensation should be effectively paid. The Kaldor-Hicks efficiency is based on the following two fundamental theorems of welfare economics 13 : "The First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics: Assume that all individuals and firms are selfish price takers. Then a competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal. The Second Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics: Assume that all individuals and producers are selfish price takers. Then almost any Pareto optimal equilibrium conclusions reached at the doctrinal stage). For example, the economic efficiency versus justice debate that permeates the question of the objectives of competition law belongs to the jurisprudential stage as it refers to the values that should provide content to the principle of coherence in legal interpretation. We have focused elsewhere on the interaction of economics and the law at the doctrinal and adjudicative stage: Lianos, I. (2009) 'Lost in translation? Towards a theory of economic transplants', Current Legal Problems 62(1) 346-404. This study will mainly focus on the jurisprudential stage, although as I will further explain, and probably contrary to Dworkin's view, there is a considerable interplay and mutual dependence between the jurisprudential and adjudicative stages, as in reality the values pursued by the specific legal system are function of a comparative institutional analysis performed at the adjudicative stage. However, for the adepts of a normative perspective in EU competition law, the two stages are clearly separated, with the adjudicative stage being locked in to decisions made at the jurisprudential stage. 11 One could advance a growth-related theory of competition law emphasizing the supply side, instead of the demand side (consumers). There is evidence that competition increases the chances of innovation and growth: Arrow, K (1962) 'Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Inventions', in (R. Nelson ed.) The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors, NBER (noting that a monopolist that is not exposed to actual or potential competition has less incentive to invest in R&D than a firm in a competitive industry);