The European food retail industry has been characterized by a trend towards greater concentration that caused an increase in the bargaining power of retail chains. On these grounds, some vertical agreements between powerful retailers and their suppliers and some mergers of food retail chains were considered anti-competitive by competition authorities. This article shows how economic reasoning can be used to assess the pro- and the anti-competitive effects of buyer power. The food retail markets in Austria and Germany are used to exemplify these concepts.
The Economic Analysis of Buyer Power in the Food Retail Industry
AbhandlungenMichael Griesinger , Johannes Paha11Michael Griesinger is a Master student of economics at Johannes Kepler University in Linz.22Dr. Johannes Paha is an assistant professor at Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen, Germany. He was a visiting professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz in spring 2016. His main research interests are on cartels and competition law compliance. Besides, he works as an economic expert on competition cases by, for example, econometrically determining damages in cartel cases.
We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Georg Götz, Prof. Dr. Franz Hackl, and Daniel Herold, M.Sc., for their insightful and informative comments on earlier versions of this article.ÖZK 2017, 43 Heft 2 v. 1.4.2017
