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The Athena Competition Law and Policy Forum (Athena Forum) will be a landmark event organized periodically by the Hellenic Competition Commission and the Hellenic Academy of Competition Law and Policy (in different locations in Greece), with the aim first to provide a forum for the discussion of crucial topics/themes among top competition policymakers in the EU and in other parts of the world, and second to enable better coordination and international cooperation between competition authorities from different parts of the world.

The Athena Forum will be organized in the format of a discussion seminar (Chatham House rules), with some introductory presentations to facilitate discussion. The forum will also offer the opportunity to engage the leadership of competition authorities from various parts of the world with high profile researchers on emerging topics in competition law scholarship and progressive thinking to keep us up to date with recent advances in research and ensure a better integration of scientific learning in policy making.

• Greening Competition Law: Competition Law Enforcement, Climate Change and Sustainability
  Competition authorities around the world are beginning to deal with the sustainable development goals, not exclusively the environmental and climate change protection agenda, but also the social sustainability one, in particular with regard to the transformation and precarity of work in the digital ‘gig’ economy. The current calls for competition law to integrate sustainable development concerns introduce an important level of institutional complexity. The integration of sustainable development goals in competition law enforcement may generate tensions with the dominant rhetoric of “consumer welfare” or “consumer well-being” in competition law, principally for the following two reasons: it will require the consideration of sustainability benefits as efficiencies, and competition decision-makers (competition authorities and courts) would need to adequately tackle the possibility of a sustainability-based trade-off between harm to competition and benefits to sustainable development. This raises important normative and methodological concerns that need to be tackled. Assuming a more open approach towards sustainability benefits under competition law is possible and desired, what forms of quantitative assessment could be applied in practice that take account of the broader social benefits/out-of-market efficiencies as well as benefits for future generations? The panel will focus on these aspects and will engage in discussing the current challenges competition authorities face in integrating sustainability concerns in their work, while not sacrificing the focus on competitive markets.

• The global regulation of digital ecosystems: ex ante v. ex post approaches/institutional architecture implications – The next steps
  One of the most profound changes in the industrial landscape in the last decade has been the growth of business ecosystems—groups of connected firms, drawing on (digital) platforms that leverage their complementors and lock in their customers, exploiting the “bottlenecks” that emerge in new industry architectures. This has created new asymmetries of power, where the “field” of competition is not the relevant product market, as is usually the case in competition law, but rather the ecosystem of various complementary products and associated complementor firms. These dynamics raise novel concerns over competition. It becomes therefore important to review how ecosystems are addressed within the current scope of competition law and identify the gap in the existing framework of conventional competition law as well as the recent efforts to provide ex ante regulatory remedies for resolution of these problems. We can of course cite the Eu regulatory framework with the Digital Market Act on ex. ante regulation and the provisions of the Data Act on interoperability and data access, which impose specific conditions to “gatekeepers.” A number of other initiatives in European countries have focused on ex post regulation. Similar proposals have been put forward in other jurisdictions. These initiatives raise the issue of the interaction of these new regulatory frameworks with competition law in the context of a specific jurisdiction, but also the interaction of the various competition law and ex ante regulation regimes at the global level, in particular as most of these regimes focus on the same Big Tech companies. The panel will take a global perspective and will focus on the challenges in instituting and implementing a regulatory framework for ecosystems that would preserve their dynamism and innovation while engaging with the competition and other economic power concerns they raise in several jurisdictions. What could be the next steps for dealing with the increasing regulatory complexity at the global level in digital?

• Macroeconomic conditions, macroeconomic tools and competition law: developing a “macro” perspective for competition law enforcement?
  The economics of competition law have been merely based on microeconomic models and overall thinking. “Competition economics” – is based in industrial organization, a sub-discipline of neoclassical price theory, which, despite the existence of various “schools” and intellectual traditions, agrees on the importance of markets and is classified in the micro-economic, as opposed to the macro-economic, “field” of economic thought. Macro-economic conditions and goals (e.g., growth, inflation) have nevertheless often interfered with competition law enforcement. The main link in today’s Industrial Organization models between competition and growth is the relation between competition and dynamic efficiency. Current discussions on the interaction of competition law with industrial policy also raise similar issues, particularly in the context of the value co-creation that takes place in modular global business ecosystems. Finally, there has been some recent debate over the role of competition law and policy as a policy tool to tame inflation. The focus on broader competition conditions, not only at the level of a relevant market, but also those of an economic sector or industry, may also illustrate the influence of macro-thinking in modern competition analysis. Of particular interest are recent macroeconomic models that aim to explore the prevalence and impact of the rise of common ownership in the economy and the “oligopoly problem” that may result from it, as well as possible effects on labour. The session will engage with the way competition authorities may take such “macro-perspective” on competition law enforcement and what could be the insights that they may gain from engaging with this research.

• Food price hikes, global food value chains and the resilience of the global food system: implications for competition law enforcement
  As the FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 159.7 points in March 2022 and 158.5 points in April 2022, the highest level it has ever reached (with the food prices being higher almost 30% than the same period last year), the issue of high food prices has been a major economic and social concern globally. The resilience of the global food system has also been affected by the significant challenges of the pandemic, the resulting logistics crisis and the recent war in Ukraine. This presents a new reality for competition authorities which have placed increasing attention in the rise of economic concentration in the various segments of the food value chain with the revenues of the top food companies worldwide soaring. Food companies do face legitimate increased costs and unique shortages, but these aren’t eating into their profits. This has raised concerns for some competition authorities, which have so far engaged with the bargaining power of some companies at some segments of the food value chain, but are increasingly interested in the way corporate consolidation may help competitors raise prices together, taking advantage of shoppers’ inflation expectations to charge a little extra and to maintain high price levels in the future. The pandemic and the recent food shortages affecting certain regions of the world following the war in Ukraine raise the issue how a long-term food supply chain resiliency plan could accommodate competition law concerns. At the same time, we have witnessed important technological innovations in the food sector with the use of new technologies (CRISPR and gene editing technologies, digital/smart agriculture, the development of e-commerce in groceries) and new business models in the production and distribution of food. The panel will explore the challenges emerging from the new geopolitical situation, the pandemic, and sustainability goals for competition law enforcement (and competition policy) in the food sector and the way competition authorities may cooperate in order to limit the negative effects of the current world food price crisis.

• The Limits of Collusion in Competition Law: Invitations to Collude, Price Signaling, Algorithmic Collusion
  Most jurisdictions have a rule against anticompetitive agreements (in the following ‘collusion rules’). These collusion rules are extended beyond obvious agreements to encompass other forms of coordination, such as ‘concerted practices’ or ‘concerted action’. The prevailing opinion is, however, that even these extensions require more than mere tacit collusion in the economic sense, that is, raising the price in parallel beyond a non-collusive equilibrium price, mere tacit collusion based on an intelligent adaptation to the observed behaviour of other firms is not caught by antitrust law unless there are reciprocal reassurances through some form of at least implicit two-way communication or plus factors that indicate coordination between the firms. This requirement for reciprocal reassurances results in the ‘oligopoly problem’ – in oligopoly markets with a sufficiently high market transparency, the firms may achieve market outcomes that are as bad as a hardcore cartel, but antitrust law cannot reach it for lack of an ‘agreement’ (even in the broader sense). Given that oligopolistic markets are, in real life, the norm rather than the exception, this formalistic approach may have substantial implications for social welfare. Occasionally, commentators have argued that the rules against anticompetitive agreements should be reinterpreted so as to catch all tacit collusion. However, this approach has been criticized: instead of allowing firms to compete freely on the best available intelligence, an approach prohibiting all collusive outcomes regardless of prior concertation would essentially require price regulation and price control – and not, as is the case today, only for some discrete regulated markets, but for all markets. This is neither practically feasible, nor would it be what we understand as free competition. There is a wide range of oligopoly markets in which market transparency is insufficiently high to collude tacitly in the absence of any further contacts between the oligopolists, but which are still sufficiently transparent to achieve collusive outcomes where some additional information is communicated. As soon as these further contacts take the form of reciprocal reassurances, even the prevailing approach finds an infringement of the collusion rules in the form of an ‘information exchange’. However, this still leaves those cases in which the participants can reach collusive results based on the unilateral disclosure of information, for example, because the firms are primarily facing a coordination problem. Addressing such cases of unilateral disclosure (through some form of price signalling) does not present the same problems as the radical solution of prohibiting all tacit collusion. The panel will engage with the need, or not, to revise the current competition law focus on the communication theory of collusion, also in view of the possibility of algorithmic collusion, and the added value of specific provisions concerning invitations to collude and/or unilateral disclosure of information about future pricing (price signalling), under specific circumstances.

GRECOTEL CAPE SOUNIO AT ATHENS RIVIERA

67 km Athens-Sounio, 19500, Sounio Visit the venue's website for more info

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Mary Chamilou | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., tel. +302108809143, mob. +306977973472
Kostas Gkourloumenos | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., tel. +302108809222, mob. +306977979714
Aggeliki Simitopoulou | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., tel. +302108809119
Ioannis Rizos | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., tel. +302108809233
Fryni Kominaki | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., tel. +302108809233

Organized by the Hellenic Competition Commission