Competition and antitrust law aims to prevent companies from engaging in anti-competitive behavior and to promote and protect market competition. In this context, mergers and acquisitions are under particular scrutiny, since they are often assumed to be motivated by possible market power increases, thus adversely affecting market efficiency. With a view to recent efforts within the European Uni...

Electric power restructuring offers a major change to the vertically integrated monopoly. The change manifests the main part of engineers’ efforts to reshape the three components of today’s vertically integrated monopoly: generation, distribution and transmission. In a restructured environment, the main tasks of these three components will remain the same as before, however, to comply with ...

We propose a simple bargaining procedure, the equilibrium of which converges to the Walrasian allocation as the agents become increasingly patient. We thus establish that the competitive outcome obtains even if agents have market power and are not price-takers. Moreover, where in other bargaining protocols the final outcome depends on bargaining power or relative impatience, the outcome here is...

Abstract The liberalization of electricity markets has been dominated by conditions oligopoly and market power, as shown in numerous studies empirical literature on the supply side. However, regulators have used statistical measurements to monitor extent making little reference founded theoretical approaches. This paper provides a new contribution presenting model construct competitive equilibr...

The main goal of MASCEM – Multi-Agent Simulator of Competitive Electricity Markets, is to give electricity market entities a tool to support their decisions and to obtain knowledge about market behaviour and evolution. Intelligent agents with strategic behaviour represent entities from electricity markets. In this paper we propose some illustrative scenarios to explain and take some conclusions...

It is widely believed that an oil weapon could impose scarcity upon the United States. Impending resource exhaustion is thought to exacerbate this threat. However, threat seems implausible when we consider strategic deficits of prospective weapon users and the improbability of impending resource exhaustion. Here, we explore a hypothesis relating oil to national security under a different assump...

The global electricity supply from non-hydro renewable energies, such as wind and solar, has being growing at a high rate, and it is expected that this trend persists. In China, Wind power is one of the most mature renewable energy technologies and it is possible to be utilized in large-scale. However, in the long run, the malicious competition will break the rule of the monopoly wind power mar...

The idea of antitrust “safety zone”is stated in the Antitrust Guidelines by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FTC. Antitrust agencies, in principle, will not intervene in market activities if the degree of market power is within the safety zone. There is, however, no solid economic rationale for the precise degree of market power that can justify this safety zone. I propose a model that ca...

We consider a model of a sector in which the same set of oligopolistic firms faces a common labour supply constraint. The wage is given in the short run, adjusting competitively in the longer run. When the costs of job creation are low relative to the degree of output market power, there exists no wage that clears the labour market in the short run, and at some wages there are two equilibria, o...