COMPETITION • EUROPEAN LAW • MERGERS
In the Airtours judgment, the European authorities defined the three conditions that must be met for coordinated effects to occur on a market or – which amounts to the same thing – for a collective dominant position to be found: (i) sufficient market transparency and product homogeneity for all members of the dominant oligopoly to be able to find out, sufficiently precisely and quickly, how the other members’ conduct is evolving in order to monitor whether they are adopting the same common policy, (ii) an incentive for members of the oligopoly not to depart from the common policy with the setting-up of retaliatory or deterrent mechanisms and (iii) the impossibility for current or future competitors or consumers to jeopardize the results expected of the common policy due to lack of countervailing power.
