Competition Law Between Old Goals and New Challenges. New tools for a ‘multi-value’ approach vis-à-vis: Digitalisation, Inequalities, and Climate Changes
type: CreativeWork
description: The research question that moves the present work is whether and how competition law shall play a role in making our society more ‘sustainable’, intending this term in a broad meaning, and therefore linked to social, economic and environmental sustainability. The question raises from the awareness of the problems that are affecting our society, also if we refer at its democratic foundations. In particular, we considered that issues such as increasing income inequalities, raising market concentration rates and the even faster climate changes are topics that cannot be outside the academic analysis of the various policies. Therefore, if we try to answer at the question if competition law shall play a role in this context, the analysis should start from the very foundations of this discipline. At this purpose, in our research, we scrutinised how the most representative competition law regimes in the world - i.e., the US antitrust law and the EU competition law systems – developed during their history. This analysis is conducted by reading through legislative sources, policy statements, judicial decisions and scholar works. What emerges is that competition law shall not only be focused on mere economic and econometric objectives, such economic efficiency, but it was intended more as a structural instrument, created for preventing the concentration of an excessive degree of economic power on the same subject or on a bounce of entities. Therefore, after having affirmed this structuralist aim of competition law, it is possible to understand how every other objective shall be considered as a by-product of a healthy competitive process, and not as an end of competition law in itself. This is particularly clear in the European context, as competition law ought not to be intended as a separate or lone subject, but as a field of law well rooted into the EU and its Member States’ constitutional traditions. After having established that competition law shall play a role in the tra…
abstract: The research question that moves the present work is whether and how competition law shall play a role in making our society more ‘sustainable’, intending this term in a broad meaning, and therefore linked to social, economic and environmental sustainability. The question raises from the awareness of the problems that are affecting our society, also if we refer at its democratic foundations. In particular, we considered that issues such as increasing income inequalities, raising market concentration rates and the even faster climate changes are topics that cannot be outside the academic analysis of the various policies. Therefore, if we try to answer at the question if competition law shall play a role in this context, the analysis should start from the very foundations of this discipline. At this purpose, in our research, we scrutinised how the most representative competition law regimes in the world - i.e., the US antitrust law and the EU competition law systems – developed during their history. This analysis is conducted by reading through legislative sources, policy statements, judicial decisions and scholar works. What emerges is that competition law shall not only be focused on mere economic and econometric objectives, such economic efficiency, but it was intended more as a structural instrument, created for preventing the concentration of an excessive degree of economic power on the same subject or on a bounce of entities. Therefore, after having affirmed this structuralist aim of competition law, it is possible to understand how every other objective shall be considered as a by-product of a healthy competitive process, and not as an end of competition law in itself. This is particularly clear in the European context, as competition law ought not to be intended as a separate or lone subject, but as a field of law well rooted into the EU and its Member States’ constitutional traditions. After having established that competition law shall play a role in the tra…
author: Piletta Massaro, Andrea
language: eng
keywords: competition law, competition, antitrust, digitalisation, digital markets, market power, regulation, fairness, European Union, Settore IUS/02 - Diritto Privato Comparato
date published: 2022-12-13
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:04:35Z
provider: Università degli Studi di Trento
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Università degli studi di Trento

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/360943

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.15168/11572_360943