Integrating Benefits from Sustainability into the Competitive Assessment—How Can We Measure Them?

Extract

I. Introduction

The European Commission and various national competition authorities presently undertake initiatives to explore whether and how to expand the scope for sustainability benefits. The Netherland’s competition authority has already published guidelines, whereas the EU-Commission’s revision of its Horizontal Guidelines has identified sustainability as a key area.¹ Irrespective of the extent to which sustainability benefits can ultimately be taken into account, they need to be measured so as to balance such benefits with the costs that arise from a potential restriction to or lessening of competition.

For this we explored the concept of ‘reflective willingness-to-pay’ in order to measure sustainability benefits, which is based on an extension of the scope for deliberation by consumers when expressing their appreciation for sustainability characteristics of a product.² At the editors’ invitation, in this contribution we hone our proposal with a particular view on its practical applicability. This requires also to expand on some of the caveats that we noted in our previous contribution. With this article, we wish to invite critical discussion in particular from practitioners, such as economic consultants.