Study Of The Plaintiff Eligibility Of Consumer In Antitrust Actions

Because of its economic characteristic, monopoly enterprises have the natural impulse to infringe other market parties include consumers. Relative to monopolies, consumers always present the obvious weak state. They are often easily infringed while using their legal rights, moreover, a majority of consumers can't receive rapid and reasonable redress afterwards. Owing to the rapid development of market economy, the infringement from illegal monopoly to consumers becomes more frequent and widespread. However, compared with huge monopoly enterprise, the consumers' personal loss is very small, and the power of consumers is too much weaker than the infringer. All these above lead to an issue that the legal rights of consumers can't be effectively protected and the aggrieved party is at large. From the experience of theory and practice we can make a conclusion:consumers preceding the antitrust lawsuit could be a useful supplement of antitrust public execution, and play an indispensable role realizing the antitrust legislation purpose of protecting consumers'rights and interests. So we should affirm the plaintiff qualification of consumers. This article deeply analyzes the importance of protecting consumer rights under the antitrust law field; put forward main problems of consumers preceding the antitrust lawsuit, including the controversy on consumers'plaintiff qualification in legislating, and issue about indirect buyers plaintiff qualification problem not clear; combining foreign typical countries legislation theory, the judicial practice and a corresponding system comparative analysis, point out some relevant enlightenment to our country. At last, according to the reality of our country, the article analyzes the special advantages and limitation of consumers, and puts forward the corresponding system construction improvement suggestions:from the legislation to clarify the indirect consumer filed a lawsuit against the monopoly, and from the program design to make sure consumers'action right realized in reality, in order to achieve the antitrust law purpose of maintaining the order of market competition and the legal rights and interests of consumers.