Consumer Protection in Resale Price Maintenance Practices

Fair business competition is greatly needed to create a conducive business climate. Regulations governing the fair business competition are expected to ensure the business opportunities for business actors and to prevent monopolistic practices and or unfair business competitions, and at the same time to protect the consumers. In Indonesia, the Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) is applied as an effort or actions of the upstream businesses such as manufacturing companies or suppliers to control the price when the goods are resold. Control and supervision of the Resale Price Maintenance practices are necessary considering that the monopolistic practice that creates unfair business competition is still common in the society. This study aimed to reveal how consumer protection in the Resale Price Maintenance practices works. This study was conducted using the normative or doctrinal research method with the statute and conceptual approaches. From the findings, it can be concluded that the consumer protection in Resale Price Maintenance practices is still very frail so that it is necessary to reconstruct the provisions in resale price maintenance which can be performed by reconstructing the criminal sanctions for business actors who violate the resale price maintenance regulations that can cause monopolistic practices and unfair business competitions.

When Franchisee Service Affects Demand: An Application to the Car Radiator Market and Resale Price Maintenance

This study provides a novel empirical framework to quantify the effect of a firm’s unobserved endogenous service on demand, in conjunction with endogenous price.

Vertical Arrangements

Then law governing vertical arrangements is a comparatively undeveloped area in NZ competition law. With only resale price maintenance (RPM) expressly prohibited by the Act, it has fallen to the general prohibitions on anticompetitive arrangements and monopolization to address traditional antitrust mischiefs such as exclusive dealing and tying. The leading case on exclusive dealing was heavily influenced by Chicagoan thinking to the degree that the courts gave the green light to durable distribution arrangements that countenanced foreclosure on a large scale and were plainly anti-competitive. However, the few cases on tying have been more fruitful insofar as remedies have been granted to rectify blatant leveraging by dominant firms into related markets. A period of active enforcement of RPM by the Commerce Commission marked the first decade, but the swathe of prosecutions dried up as the twenty-first century began.

Regtech as an antitrust enforcement tool

Financial technology (Fintech) has been applied to business models in the financial services sector. Associated with this has been the rise of regulatory technology (Regtech) in that sector. However, the major application of Regtech in financial services is as a tool for regulatory compliance, rather than for regulatory enforcement. This article explores an approach to applying Regtech techniques to antitrust enforcement. It does this by applying those techniques to the detection of resale price maintenance (vertical price fixing). The exploration is limited to pricing on e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress, eBay, and Amazon Marketplace. The Regtech application is effected by presenting the literature and cases on resale price maintenance and the application of the law in Australia, the US, and the EU. The article examines the application of machine learning in the Regtech environment and the ways in which application programming interfaces could be used. The article proposes approaches to machine learning solutions for the detection of potentially infringing resale price maintenance conduct. It also presents the basis of an algorithm for detecting that conduct.

Should There Be a Relevant Market Definition and Should All Parties to the Agreement Be Identified in Resale Price Maintenance Cases?

Anti-comparative Vertical Agreements

A Concise History of United States Resale Price Maintenance Arrangements and its Current Status under State and Federal Laws

Resale price maintenance (RPM), a form of vertical price fixing is the practice whereby manufacturers of brand-name or trademark goods stipulate and attempt to enforce minimum, maximum, or actual wholesale and retail prices of such goods as they progress through the distribution chain to the final consumers of said products.