Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Interactions between competition and consumer policy

Contents:

Author Info

  • Armstrong, M.

Abstract

This paper discusses complementarities and tensions between competition policies and consumer protection policies. The paper argues that markets will often supply adequate customer protection without the need for extra public intervention. Special areas where intervention might be needed are discussed, including the need to combat deceptive marketing and the need to provide additional market transparency (about both headline prices and shrouded product attributes). A few instances are presented of how more intense competition can worsen the outcomes for some consumers. Situations in which poorly designed consumer policies can harm consumers are discussed, including how they can be used to protect incumbent suppliers, how they can relax competition between oligopolists, how they can reduce consumer choice, how they can focus on one aspect of market performance at the expense of others, and how they can lead consumers to take insufficient care in the market.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/7634/1/7634.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by University College London in its series Open Access publications from University College London with number http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/7634/.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: Apr 2008
Date of revision:
Publication status: Published in Competition Policy International (2008-04) v.4, p.97-147
Handle: RePEc:ner:ucllon:http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/7634/

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.ucl.ac.uk

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

References

No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ner:ucllon:http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/7634/

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Kieron Jones).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.