A smorgasbord of competition topics

Last weekend's annual workshop of the Competition Law and Policy Institute of NZ had a series of good sessions. They were all interesting: I got a lot out of  Professor Brent Fisse's very balanced analysis of the recent Harper competition review in Australia (even if we agreed to differ on changing the test of 'abuse of market power' in our s36 and their s46 of our respective competition laws), and from the session on whether broadcasting is ripe for regulation, where Buddle Findlay's Tony Dellow and Covec's John Small concluded (correctly) that it wasn't.

Here's an assortment of other stuff that I found interesting.

Princeton's Bobby Willig spoke on 'Merger Analysis', mostly about the application of the 'GUPPI', or 'Gross Upward Pricing Pressure Index' (yes, cue for fish puns...). Willig is one of these top-rate US economics professors who manage to combine elite academic credentials with top teaching skills and a wide commercial consultancy practice (he's been involved, in NZ alone, in Air New Zealand/Qantas, air cargo, and Fonterra's milk pricing), with synergies all round. I was left convinced that the upward pricing principle approach "is a valuable source of more granular and extensive insights into merger impacts than are available from an accurate qualitative articulation alone".

Or to put it another way, look at the data. If, after a merger, a business would own both product A and the newly acquired but previously competing product B, and would be tempted to jack up the price of A knowing that some of the sales lost will come back to it as increased sales of B (that's how the "upward pricing pressure" on A works), a competition authority concerned about potential post-merger price increases ought to look at exactly how much of a substitute B is for A, rather than taking a qualitative guess. It ought to get to grips with whatever data or natural experiments are available to calculate how much leakage of sales will occur between A and B.

The good thing is that not only will there be better-informed merger decisions, but in today's 'big data' world the opportunities to estimate diversion ratios between A and B, or, same diff, cross-price elasticities, are getting better all the time - a conclusion I'd also come to last month at the LEANZ presentation AUT's Lydia Cheung gave on quantitative techniques for competition analysis (write-up here).

There was a terrific session on "Vertical restraints", where a first class paper by Russell McVeagh's Troy Pilkington was followed up by an equally impressive comment paper from the Commerce Commission's David Shaharudin. Vertical restraints, and the courts' and economists' take on their legitimacy, are one of those things that, as Troy and David pointed out, have been all over the place, from explicitly legal to explicitly illegal and all points in between (retail price maintenance has been similar). Currently, things appear to have setted down where they should probably have always been - permissible, subject to a net benefits test.

And then there was the fascinating presentation by ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court on "Unconscionable conduct and supermarkets", where the ACCC had pinged Coles for a series of unilateral strong-arm abuses of its suppliers. We don't have "unconscionable conduct" in our competition law - there's the odd similar sort of provision here and there, such as the ability to re-open "oppressive" credit contracts under Part 5 of the Credit Contract and Consumer Finance Act, but not any overarching provision - and at first blush, based on Sarah's account of the Australian goings on, you'd be tempted to think we ought to have the same tools to knock any New Zealand business thuggery on the head as they have for theirs.

But as Bell Gully's Jenny Stevens argued in her commentary reply, if you're going to legislate or regulate, the first thing you've got to do is define the problem you're trying to deal with, and  it's not a given that we do, in fact, have the same sorts of standover issues that the ACCC have had to confront. I'd have to agree: I wouldn't say all of our businesspeople are lining up for canonisation, but on the other hand we also generally tend to be a high trust society where many transactions are handled equitably on a handshake basis, or close to it. If that gets abused, let's act, but in the meantime it's not a bad way to run our particular whelk stall.