MaCCI Annual Conference 2018 Focuses on Competition and Innovation
Conferences
15.03.2018
In collaboration with the University of Mannheim, ZEW hosted the seventh annual conference of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI). About 120 participants, including many renowned experts from the worlds of research and business, attended the event to discuss cutting-edge and highly relevant research issues relating to competition and innovation from an economic and legal perspective.
The highlights of the conference included the keynote speeches delivered by Professor Fiona M. Scott Morton (Yale University) and Professor Daniel Zimmer (University of Bonn). In her address, Professor Scott Morton presented her research on the causes of increased corporate markups with a particular focus on the influence of competition policy. Professor Zimmer, who served as chair of the German Monopolies Commission from 2012 to 2016, chose to focus his keynote on algorithms and discussed potential changes to competition and regulation law.
Topics ranging from the European Court of Justice to the digital future
In parallel sessions, researchers presented their latest contributions to the fields of economics and law, which were then discussed with a leading expert in either the research or business community with a similar field of interest. Sparking particular interest were the sessions on issues subject to current intense debate among experts, such as bilateral markets, buying power and vertical competition restraints, as did the invited sessions in which three renowned guest speakers shared their thoughts on a common topic. One of these sessions saw the former chief economist at the Directorate-General for Competition at the European Commission, Professor Massimo Motta (Barcelona Graduate School of Economics) discuss the European Court of Justice’s most recent ruling on Intel. This led to an in-depth discussion of the influence of digitalisation on legal conditions with respect to competition and regulation.
A successful platform for interdisciplinary research and discussion
Due to the high number of outstanding submissions received this year, the organiser made the decision to increase the number of presentations in the parallel sessions from 45 to 60. With roughly 120 participants attending as a result of this change, this year’s event set a new record for the number of attendees at a MaCCI conference. This year’s conference also succeeded in encouraging an exchange of knowledge between economists and legal experts on the one hand, and between the research and business community on the other. The eighth annual conference is planned for 28–29 March 2019, although there will be other MaCCI events organised in the meantime, including the Mannheim Energy Conference on 14–15 May 2018.
About MaCCI
MaCCI stands for the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation. MaCCI is a research alliance between ZEW and the School of Law and Economics at the University of Mannheim which encourages the exchange of knowledge between economists and legal experts and in doing so inspires new approaches to issues relating to competition, regulation and innovation policy. Core topics analysed by MaCCI include vertical competition restraints, abuse of market power, merger control, public and private enforcement of competition law, and regulations in the telecommunications and energy market.
