Today the Working Group on Competition Economics held its fifth meeting by video. Bundeskartellamt staff and economic researchers discussed topical competition economics issues. The agenda of the meeting this time included discussions about cooperations in fibre deployment and merger control in the hospital sector.

Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt: “Cooperations between fibre broadband providers can help to supply households with high bandwidth connections more quickly. However, cooperations between large telecommunications companies often have considerable effects on competition. Ultimately consumers only benefit from such cooperations if deployment is really accelerated and results in attractive products at reasonable prices. This requires the right framework conditions for cooperation and a competitive environment. The exchange with academic experts helps us to further develop our examination concepts for cooperations in the telecommunications sector.
The main objective of hospital merger control is to maintain competition in the provision of high quality healthcare for patients. Patients choose the best hospital in their area on their doctors’ advice. The incentive for hospitals to provide better quality than their competitors is reduced if there is only one local hospital operator. We therefore aim to maintain sufficient operator diversity for the benefit of patients. In our case practice we carry out differentiated economic analyses for which we greatly appreciate the methodical and conceptual input from economic researchers.”

The following academic experts took part in the fifth meeting of the Working Group on Competition Economics: Professor Dr Stefan Bühler (University of St. Gallen), Professor Dr Tomaso Duso (German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin), Professor Dr Justus Haucap (Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics), Professor Dr Roman Inderst (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main), Professor Dr Wolfgang Kerber (Philipps University Marburg), Professor Dr Martin Peitz (University of Mannheim), Professor Dr Markus Reisinger (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management), Professor Achim Wambach, Ph.D. (Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim) and Professor Dr Christine Zulehner (University of Vienna).