Excessive Pricing: A Rare Concept In Competition Law

I. Introduction

The concept of excessive pricing has recently risen from the grave and once again became a hot topic of discussion within the competition law community, due to the various investigations initiated by the European Commission. In a parallel development, this intriguing concept has also been scrutinized by the Turkish Competition Board in a couple of cases within the last few years.

In general, excessive pricing can be a slippery slope for competition enforcement authorities, as some academic commentators and competition authorities consider excessive pricing behavior to be "self-correcting, because excessive prices will attract new entry."^[1] In other words, if entry to a particular market is not completely impeded (or made impossible) by structural obstacles, a dominant undertaking that applies excessive prices in that market will eventually be beaten back by the effective competition in the market. Thus, according to this argument, it would be