What should competition authorities do when an agreement between competitors would both promote sustainability and restrict competition? In this article, Nadine Watson explains that – even within the consumer welfare framework – authorities can already support more sustainability agreements. Drawing on lessons from environmental economics, she demonstrates that the apparent tension between consumers’ interests and the environment is often a failure in analysts’ methodology, not in consumers’ values.

For estimating the pass-on effect in antitrust damages cases, the EC Guidelines distinguish two empirical approaches: the comparator approach and the pass-on rate approach. In our view, its clear preference for the comparator approach is unwarranted; in many common and realistic scenarios, the pass-on rate method should be more feasible and give rise to more reliable results.

In competition proceedings, dozens of hypotheses require testing. But the data to analyse these questions is often not feasibly available. Natural Language Processing is changing that. NLP is a powerful and exciting area of data science that allows us to extract information from textual sources systematically, building datasets that were prohibitively costly to analyse with traditional techniques, or impractically time consuming.

The effects of vertical integration can vary and often depend on the specific setting of a merger. Carlos Noton and Angelos Stenimachitis set out how these should be assessed in transactions involving healthcare providers and insurers – which exhibit additional forces to the typical vertical integration case – and discuss the factors that determine their impact on consumer welfare.