Preisgarantien im Wettbewerbsrecht

englischEconomic research shows that competitor-based-pricing, promising to match or to beat a competitor’s lower price, can impede competition. By using these types of guarantees a firm could deter its rivals from undercutting its price because the resulting quantity effect is lower than usual. At first glance, German and European competition law provides a suitable tool to tackle such behavior. Under traditional doctrine, however, the concept of a ‘concerted practice’ within the prohibition of cartels is not applied to collusion following the singular-individual adoption of facilitating practices. This notion is put into question and a new approach distinguishing between (lawful) conscious parallelism and (illegal) unilateral collusion presented.