IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jcomle/v8y2012i4p717-768..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Loyalty Rebates And The Competitive Process

Author

Listed:
  • Hans Zenger

Abstract

The degree of divergence between U.S. and European case law on the proper legal treatment of loyalty rebates is larger than in almost any other field of international antitrust law. Whereas U.S. jurisprudence has traditionally considered loyalty rebates to be a procompetitive business practice, the Court of Justice of the European Union has repeatedly held that loyalty rebates are an illegal means of distorting competition. This article challenges the Community Courts' conviction that loyalty rebates do not constitute competition on the merits and claims the opposite. The adoption of loyalty rebates is a direct consequence and a vital expression of the competitive process. The need for different forms of loyalty rebates naturally emerges from the diverse market conditions that prevail in different industries, which explains the widespread use of diverse loyalty rebates in business practice. It is the heterogeneity of commercial pressures that dominant firms are facing that determines the competitive structure and size of their rebates. By suppressing competition in rebates, orthodox legal doctrine in Europe has distorted the competitive process in a variety of global markets, and thereby caused significant harm to competition and consumers. Since loyalty rebates are an efficient and healthy form of competition, plaintiffs and competition authorities that allege anticompetitive foreclosure as a result of loyalty rebates should generally carry the burden of proving the existence of a restriction of competition. The Court's prevailing interpretation of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), by contrast, is bound to punish successful innovators and to protect less effective rivals from the inconveniences of the competitive process.

Suggested Citation

  • Hans Zenger, 2012. "Loyalty Rebates And The Competitive Process," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 8(4), pages 717-768.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:8:y:2012:i:4:p:717-768.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/joclec/nhs023
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David E. Mills, 2017. "Inducing Cooperation with a Carrot Instead of a Stick," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 50(2), pages 245-261, March.
    2. Lisa Bruttel, 2019. "Is There a Loyalty-Enhancing Effect of Retroactive Price-Reduction Schemes?," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 54(3), pages 575-593, May.
    3. Stanley Besen, 2014. "Trying to Promote Network Entry: From the Chain Broadcasting Rules to the Channel Occupancy Rule and Beyond," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 45(3), pages 275-293, November.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices
    • L42 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Vertical Restraints; Resale Price Maintenance; Quantity Discounts

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:8:y:2012:i:4:p:717-768.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jcle .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.