Fighting Predation

The major interest of antitrust law and economics with respect to predation strategies has been largely twofold. On the one hand, there has been a lively discussion on the question whether predation can basically be a rational strategy for an incumbent facing an entry threat. On the other hand, research has focused on the problem of how an antitrust authority could and should detect predation strategies and especially distinguish such abuses from socially desirable, procompetitive behaviour. The focus of this chapter, however, is to think beyond these two standard questions of rationality and detection and to concentrate on a third stage in the antitrust analysis of predation: intervention. This stage acknowledges the necessity of appropriate detection rules for efficient predation enforcement, but it uses these insights to answer the complementary question of how these rules should be linked to intervention against predation strategies. As developed in chapter 2, thoughtful answers to the intervention question are key in the development and implementation of an integrated approach of antitrust analysis which aims at creating and maintaining an efficient antitrust policy.