ABSTRACT
Competition law is a rapidly developing area, fundamental to most legal systems. Despite its idiosyncratic and technical character, it influences numerous fields of law and itself draws heavily on principles of economics and politics. Its primary aim is to protect and encourage the competitive process, resulting in an optimum allocation of resources and the maximisation of consumer welfare. Bork points out: ‘antitrust was originally conceived as a limited intervention in free and private processes for the purpose of keeping these processes free’. 1 In other words, competition law regulates market behaviour in order to preserve a free market economy. In a perfectly competitive market - i.e. one in which there are no barriers to entry or exit, where buyers and sellers of homogeneous products are plentiful, and where competitors have similar and very small market shares and there is total transparency - a system of competition law would be superfluous. This type of market is, however, almost impossible to find in practice, just as pure monopoly is unlikely to arise without state intervention. Most markets are placed between these two extremes and, in the absence of any form of control, undertakings are inclined to collude to fix prices, those in a dominant position misuse their market strength and mergers lead to excessive concentrations of economic power. 2 All these practices hinder or impede the competitive process.
