PhD Award to Ignacio Herrera Anchustegui

As part of the award, Ignacio’s thesis will be published in the Concurrences Collection. His dissertation was supervised by Ass. Prof. Ronny Gjendemsjø, UoB, and Prof. Erling Hjelmeng, UoO.

Concurrences, is a well-known French/English Antitrust & Competition Economics publisher and event organizer. Every year, it selects the best PhD dissertation in the field of competition law or economics. The prize has been awarded to dissertations written in English and/or French since 2005.

The submitted theses are evaluated by a jury of distinguished scholars and practitioners. This year’s jury was composed by Catherine Prieto, professor at Paris I University, Panthéon-Sorbonne, Nicolas Petit, professor at the Law School of the University of Liege, Sylvaine Poillot-Peruzzetto, French Supreme Court, Wouter Wils, Hearing Officer, European Commission; Visiting Professor, King’s College London, and Philippe Choné, Professor at the ENSAE.

Ignacio’s dissertation, “Buyer Power in EU Competition Law”, presents a thorough discussion of buyer power across all competition law areas.

He held his trial lecture 9 February 2017 on the topic: “Buyer power. How to reconcile ordoliberalism, neoclassical economics and current industrial organization research? What are the legal (competition law) implications and the relative strengths and weaknesses of these approaches?”. Ignacio defended his thesis 10 February 2017.

Unlike most works in the field, Ignacio’s thesis did not center on the application of the law in different areas (coordinated and unilateral behavior, and mergers), but on the ‘theories of harm’ that explain how buyer power may produce anticompetitive effects. In the dissertation, Ignacio adopted an ‘economically informed legal analysis’ methodology by which the legal discussion was accompanied and guided by microeconomics and industrial organization to better understand the regulation to this market power problem

One of Ignacio’s the main findings is that buyer power can be employed in an anticompetitive way, and when this occurs EU competition law is well equipped to deal with these abuses. However, more often than not, buyer (bargaining) power has an efficiency enhancing effect in the market as it reduces or neutralizes opposing seller market power, approaching prices towards the competitive level.

Ignacio has previously been awarded the Scholar-In-Recidence Programs award by Antitrust Law Section of the American Bar Association. In 2016, BECCLE’s Malgorzata Agnieszka Cyndecka was awarded the European State Aid Quarterly’s award for best PhD dissertation since 2012 within the field of state aid.