Can two wrongs make a right? Reconsidering minimum resale price maintenance in the light of Allianz Hungária

Abstract

Minimum resale price maintenance (RPM) agreements constitute hard-core vertical restraints and are treated as object restrictions in EU competition law. This article suggests that the time may have come where this approach is revised. After, first, discussing the economic theory behind RPM and the EU Court’s approach to object restrictions, it argues that the recent widening of the object analysis and the concomitant blurring of the object and effect categories may aid EU competition law to reconceptualise the approach to minimum RPM.