ANTITRUST LAW AND SUPERMARKETS: HOW THESE TWO-SIDED PLATFORMS can CAUSE HARM TO CONSUMERS?

Abstract

This article proposes, in the light of the evolution of the traditional vision of retail supermarkets, a modern antitrust analysis of this sector, seeking to overcome the idea that supermarkets appear as neutral agents of the market, hence the market power in supermarket retailer can impact on the competition field. Thus, this article studies the supermarkets as two-sided platforms with characteristics of the competitive bottleneck. According to the two-sided platform theory, the supermarkets should be analyzed as service providers for final consumers and suppliers, noting that these two distinct groups depend on the supermarket for the intermediation of transactions, which means that there are indirect externalities between the two groups and, consequently, confers bargaining power to the platform. Furthermore, according to the theory of bottlenecks to competition, it can be argued that the retail supermarket has a monopoly power to provide access to one group or another. This proposal, as this article seeks to demonstrate, brings with it a new way of understanding the possible legal relationships of the agents in the retail supermarket, in their vertical, horizontal and diagonal relations.

Keywords
Antitrust law; supermarket retailer; two-sided platform; competitive bottleneck model