Collective Dominance Under Scrutiny: Closing the Enforcement Gap or Complicating EU Competition Policy?

This paper examines the European Commission’s Draft Guidelines on Article 102 TFEU, focusing on their treatment of collective dominance in oligopolistic markets. While the Guidelines adopt a structured framework derived from merger control, they fail to address a key challenge specific to Article 102: the need for clear evidentiary standards in retrospective enforcement. The paper argues that parallel conduct by independent firms can, in certain cases, serve as evidence of collective dominance where such behaviour is not rational absent joint market power. However, the Draft Guidelines offer little guidance on how to integrate such conduct into the dominance analysis. This gap risks leaving the collective dominance conceptually recognised but practically underenforced, thereby limiting the EU’s ability to tackle anticompetitive outcomes in concentrated markets.