Mika Oinonen, Author at Kluwer Competition Law Blog

“Special responsibility” through clear-cut market share threshold — Proposed new assessment criterion for addressing dominance in Finnish grocery retail sector

Mika Oinonen (Finnish Competition Authority, Finland)/December 15, 2012 /Leave a comment

Background A special programme for promoting healthy competition in Finland was launched in the early 2012. One key objective of the programme is to tackle the challenges in enhancing effective competition in the Finnish grocery retail sector, identified e.g. in the so-called Europe 2020 Strategy approved by the European Council in July 2012. Resulting from…

Enforcement, Mergers

Some remarks on institutional limitations of small agencies on the use of wide-scale economic analysis tools in case analysis

Mika Oinonen (Finnish Competition Authority, Finland)/September 6, 2012 /Leave a comment

Many new economic analysis tools have been introduced, particularly for merger analysis during the last decade. Some of these tools have also raised considerable public interest. For instance, probably not many have avoided hearing of the UPP test, and undoubtedly many are already familiar with the meaning of the abbreviations GUPPI, IPR and CMCR. The…

Economics, Mergers

The more technical, the better? Economic evidence in merger assessment

Mika Oinonen (Finnish Competition Authority, Finland)/February 8, 2012July 16, 2018 /Leave a comment

Economics has an increasingly important role in merger assessment. Hardly anyone can imagine trying to build a solid major merger case anymore without paying at least some attention to the indirect evidence gained from analyzing the set of indicative economic factors of the case at hand. Whilst there are differences e.g. between different NCA’s and…

European Commission, Mergers, United States of America

Status quo of structural assumption in merger control

Mika Oinonen (Finnish Competition Authority, Finland)/November 4, 2011 /Leave a comment

Public discussion on merger control in the last few years of has put the spotlight on two elements of contemporary merger analysis: market definition and market concentration, of which the former has raised considerable debate, in particular. It has been asked if market definition has de facto become superfluous to merger analysis due to some…

European Union, Mergers

The “Small Market Problem” in EU Merger Control: Time to move on from the market definition argument

Mika Oinonen (Finnish Competition Authority, Finland)/February 3, 2011 /1 Comment

The fairness of EU competition policy has been frequently challenged in the 2000s. It has been argued that the European Commission discriminates against small market companies in its merger assessment. Discussion on the reasons of the alleged discrimination has frequently revolved around the Commission’s method of market delineation in its merger assessment, which would result…