EXCLUSIONARY PRICING AND CONSUMERS HARM: THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION'S PRACTICE IN THE DSL MARKET

The assessment of exclusionary abuses by dominant firms is byno means an easy task. This is particularly true for pricingabuses, as there is no clear-cut way of distinguishing a pricecut that is abusive from one that instead is pro-competitive.We argue that there are several shortcomings in the way theEuropean Commission as assessed exclusionary pricing abusesin two important decisions concerning Internet access servicemarkets: Deutsche Telekom AG and Wanadoo Interactive. Firstof all, in computing downstream costs to apply the price squeezetest the incumbent's economies of scale and unavoidable costsshould be factored in, as the test is only meant to establishwhether an as-efficient competitor has been unlawfully foreclosed.Secondly, since the price squeeze test provides only for a necessarycondition for predation to occur, it is also necessary to provethat the recoupment of initial losses is a plausible scenarioso that the conduct under examination may indeed turn out tobe harmful to consumers. This is all but a trivial task, asthere are some sources of endogeneity that may cause a radicalchange in the underlying market structure. Particularly, inmarkets at early stage of development, entry barriers that mayfacilitate the recoupment of initial losses ex-ante may causea change such that market structure no longer supports recoupmentex-post.     

Negotiating state and society: the normative informal economies of Central Asia and the Caucasus

ABSTRACT

This special issue introduces new research on informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The research presented here was conducted in Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Beijing, Guangzhou, Yiwu and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. The following eight articles illustrate how informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus provided spaces for people across the region to negotiate state and society in the last three decades; the articles also suggest that informality should be seen as constitutive of a normative order for polities in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Informal markets and trade in Central Asia rest on three factors: the inability of the state to measure commercial transactions; markets and trade becoming places from which citizens built personalized networks that required individualized networking and oral agreements based on social relations, particularly trust; and markets being embedded within states in which clientelism frequently thrives.     

Tod des Antragstellers in Medienrechtssachen während des Rechtsmittelverfahrens

Hindert der Tod den Privatankl?ger, gewisse Rechtshandlungen vorzunehmen, deren Unterlassung dieselbe Wirkung hat wie die ausdrückliche Zurücknahme der Anklage, ist das Verfahren einzustellen. Stirbt der Privatankl?ger aber zu einem Zeitpunkt, zu dem es solcher Rechtshandlungen nicht mehr bedarf, fehlt ein gesetzlich vorgesehener Grund zur Einstellung des Verfahrens. Der Tod des Privatankl?gers w?hrend des Rechtsmittelverfahrens hindert eine Entscheidung über die – von wem auch immer – ergriffene Berufung nicht. Kommt es dabei zu einer Aufhebung des Urteils und zu einer neuen Hauptverhandlung in erster Instanz, so hat das Ausbleiben des Privatankl?gers bei dieser Hauptverhandlung die Einstellung des Verfahrens zur Folge. Da die §§ 14 ff MedienG keine Sonderbestimmung für den Fall des Todes des Antragsstellers (Gegendarstellungswerbers) enthalten, gilt das zum Tod des Privatankl?gers Gesagte.     

Clearing the muddy waters of shared watercourses governance: conceptualizing international River Basin Organizations

Institutions that have been set up by riparian states to internationally govern shared water resources—international River Basin Organizations (RBOs)—play a key role in river basin governance. Despite an increased attention paid to RBOs in international relations and water scholarship, there has been little focus on defining and conceptualizing RBOs and, subsequently, on comprehensively identifying the RBOs that exist around the world. This has challenged research around RBOs in both methodological and theoretical ways. This paper aims to meet this challenge by offering a theoretically grounded definition of an international RBO and crafting a comprehensive list of international RBOs. We do so deductively, building from the larger neo-institutionalist research and international water resources governance literature. Our definition identifies three broad categories of constitutive elements: internationalization, institutionalization and governance. We apply this definition to potential cases to better identify the extent of RBOs around the world today and outline which cases qualify as RBOs and which cases fail to meet our constitutive criteria. This allows us to compile a comprehensive list of all existing international RBOs, including the identification of RBOs with specific characteristics. The article concludes by crafting an agenda for future research around RBOs that builds on this more complete understanding of RBOs.