Welcome

"Destroying competition means killing creativity" (Frédéric Bastiat)




If you are interested in competition, this website is for you : whatever your opinion about competition, you will find more than 200 papers, videos and statistics, all with free access !

This website will help you better undestand this anonymous strength called "competition",  which benefits everyone, has the virtue to push the price down, stimulates creativity and productivity, creates new jobs and fosters economic growth, and .... (in my opinion) result in fair rewards.
Competition is not an ideology, nor liberal neither socialist. It's also not a ideal ; It's just a mechanism - but a very strong one-, a necessary ingredient for prosperity which stimulate economic democracy in business.

Fight against cartels

When you compete in the market, you have to respect some rules, as in a sports game. The most important rule is to take your strategic decisions (such as fixing your price) independently from your competitors. In particular, fixing prices with competitors, dividing markets with them, collectively excluding new competitors from the market ("collective boycott") are absolutely prohibited by competition law. This kind of behavior -called "cartel"- is injustified because the price increase is not the result of your merits (better products, innovative marketing, ...). Antitrust authorities fight against this anticompetitive practices, which cause huge damages to the economy and to consumers.

Low cost competition


In order to escape from competition, firmes try to differenciate their products and process, especially by lowering their production cost. The low cost is a new business model witch relies on a very simple principle : an extreme simplification of products and services content, in order to decrease costs and ... cut price down. The low cost model is now widespread, not only in the airline industry but also in many sectors such as cars, mobile phone, food retailing, etc.


Competition in France

Many colleagues write about this fascinating topic -competition in France- and have a realistic and critical view on the situation in our country.
In this section, I propose a selection of their papers about : the role of competition in economic growth, the impact of competition on employment, the competition as a means to break up injustified rents, the French critical attitude towards competition.

Class actions

Beyond the intervention of competition authorities, anticompetitive practices could result in private actions, with the objective to compensate victims and repair damages. The issue of civil action in Europe is currently debated, in a context of underenforcement by public authorities. In France, the debate focuses on the opportunity to introduce a "class action" system.

Competition and Intellectual Property Rights

The pharmaceutical industry is characterized by huge R&D investments which are necessary to discover and launch new drugs and vaccines on the market. Innovating products are protected by Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), such as patents and trademarks. The patent consists in giving the innovator a commercial exclusivity for a certain period of time (twenty years), before the innovative product falls in the public domain.
Two aspects of the relation between patent and competition are treated in this section :
- which kind of strategies could be used by laboratories, in order to delay the entry of competing products on the market, in particular when patents expire ? To what extent are these strategies allowed by antitrust authorities and in conformity with competition law ?
- how to reconciliate patent implementation (after the WTO agreement on intellectual property rights in 2005) with the free access to drugs for poor people in developing countries ?

All papers published on this website are in free access on Internet, except my papers in the review Concurrences, for which I obtained the editor authorization. I would like to thank him sincerely for his cooperation.

The opinions expressed on this website are mine and don't engage any institutions whith whom I have a professional relationship.


I would like to thank Geneviève,  who helped me build this website.
I would also like to thank Michael, who contributed regularly to translating my website in English.