Frontier’s Luís Campos, Associate Director in the competition practice, spoke at a Concurrences conference “Dominance and concentration of platforms: should the competition authorities regulate?”, held at Gide Loyrette Nouel.

The panel included high-profile speakers from economic, legal and institutional backgrounds, who provided insights on the challenges of merger analysis and potential abuse of dominance in the online platform market.

Drawing on Frontier’s direct experience in merger review in the online platform market, Luís focused on how the particular features of digital platform markets affect the economic analysis in these markets. Luís first considered a case where merging parties follow similar business models (read more in our Just Eat/Hungry House case study) before highlighting the challenges raised by merger between platforms with distinct business models, including the potential for “killer acquisitions”.  One key insight is that differences in the service provided and in the business model followed by rival platforms are important elements that need to be considered in the analysis. In some circumstances these differences may counterbalance the network effects that tend to favour established platforms.

Concurrences is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that is released to discuss national and European Union competition laws.

Frontier regularly provides advice across a variety of sectors in relation to mergers, abuse of dominance and other antitrust issues.

For more information, please contact media@frontier-economics.com or call +44 (0) 20 7031 7000