Competition Monitoring Torn Between the Conflicting Priorities of Economic Design Options and Competition Policy Expectations

The Amendment to the Competition Act entering into force on 1 March 2013 provides the legal groundwork for competition monitoring as an additional responsibility to be performed by the Austrian Competition Authority. Legislators have been sparing in prescribing any specific design. Such leeway may be used in order to implement, by way of a uniform top-down approach in quantitative terms, an original form of competition monitoring, proposed by WIFO already back in 2006, to identify markets which due to their restrictions on competition justify an in-depth investigation by the competition authorities.