Price Parallelism on Mobile Communication Markets: Three Interpretations

Price parallelism in itself is not a violation of antitrust law. However, in the mobile communication market, it is complemented by features of product characteristics and industry regulation in such a way that, as a result, it often attracts the attention of antitrust authorities as a sign of concerted actions (or agreements) restricting competition. The article shows that the existing norms in the law that describe the criteria for classifying concerted actions are based on economic models that often do not take into account some real features of the market and of the sellers and buyers. As a result, the same observable practices may have alternative interpretations that do not imply any kind of coordination between market participants. The article offers three such alternative interpretations: through the discrepancy between the expected and actual volume of service consumption, from the standpoint of the «new theory of consumer demand» and from the behavioral economics standpoint. To make a decision about the existence of a violation, these hypotheses concerning the causes of parallel behavior must be disproved with a sufficient degree of accuracy, otherwise there is a high risk of law enforcement errors.