Business Models and Incentives: For an Effects-Based Approach of Self-Preferencing?

From an economic perspective, the Shopping judgment places great emphasis on the criterion of the abnormality of the dominant firm’s behaviour and its change over time. Such a market strategy, which could be labelled as leveraging or self-preferencing, invites us to consider, in the light of recent work in the field of industrial organization, the business models of large platforms and their incentives. These studies also allow assessing the strategies of platforms that discriminate between their various complementors or adopt a dual role leading to a vertical integration. The lessons learned lead to discuss the appropriate treatment of these practices by competition rules, ranging from a per se prohibition to an effects-based approach.