Study On The Antitrust Regulation Of Price Collusion Issues In B2B Platform

Cartel is gradually generated in the process of laissez-faire capitalism developing into monopoly capitalism. Article One of "Sherman Act", the world’s first anti-trust law, makes it clear that collusion produced in the process of trade would constitutes a felony. Obviously, Cartel has become the focus of anti-monopoly regulations since the beginning of the world’s anti-monopoly battle. Monopoly agreements can be divided into many types, among which and the price collusion is the most common form of monopolistic behavior, and it is also the emphasis and difficulty in the process of practice. Article 13 of Chinese Anti-monopoly Law explicitly prohibits the fixing price behavior. Obviously the exchange of information is the basis of price collusion, but the spread and exchange of information has become more convenient in the era of electronic information, thus there come out the situations even harder to regulate. If we exchange via B2 B platform, it would be difficult to discover, identify and enforce the collusion. This paper is divided into two main lines: the first line starts with two foreign collusion cases referring to information exchange, then analyzes the positive and negative effects of B2 B information exchange under the antitrust law theory, and expresses the particularity of the information exchange via B2 B platform. The second line starts with expounding the nature and economic meaning of B2 B platform, then concludes that information can be exchanged quickly under the extensive use of B2 B market, as a result there exist problems in identifying implied collusion behavior, and the collusion of bilateral market makes the regulative problem even harder. the nature of the B2 B platform, the information could be passed quickly and it is very difficult to identify collusion behavior. Due to that B2 B platform has certain peculiarities, the paper raises advices specific to the legislative and executive deficiencies about anti-monopoly after comparing the European and American methods.This paper consists of six parts, and the following are the main contents of each section:The first part is the introduction. It describes the background, literature review and research methods of this article. Readers could overview the purpose and necessity of the paper. The paper summarizes relevant outcomes from the scholars’ years of study, as well as the views of different scholars to relevant problems. The paper selects a new angle on the basis of the existent research results.The second part mainly introduces the presentation of antitrust law on the B2 B platform, analyzes the necessity of regulation and proposes some problems about regulations. The paper demonstrates the necessity of this research in introducing two European and America cases and analyzing and the development prospect of B2 B platform. Europe and America are the world’s most developed regions, whose anti-trust laws are relatively complete. But they also meet the challenges in the regulatory aspects of B2 B platforms. In order to regulate the collusion and keep the market order of B2 B platform, they strengthen the use of the settlement agreement and establish the use of censorship. Facing the rapid expansion of Chinese B2 B market, the anti-trust authorities will also face a two-handed selection: on the one hand, B2 B could significantly promote economic development, as a result it will restrain its development if laws become too strict; on the other hand, the present and future regulatory costs must be considered sufficiently, therefore China should also pay attention to the impact of science and technology. Under the current anti-trust law system, there exist some deficiencies in the regulations to the price collusion behaviors in B2 B platform.The third part analyzes the information exchange agreements via the theory of antitrust monopoly. There come out collusion behaviors from B2 B platform, where information exchange is necessary. This section analyzes the impacts of information exchange from the value level, and the important conditions. In addition, the section discusses the legal substance of B2 B platform.The fourth part analyzes the harmful degree in B2 B platform according to the economic theory, and it is different from the traditional marketplace. These factors differing from traditional markets have increased the difficulty of regulating the B2 B platform.The fifth part analyzes the Europe and America’s cases on B2 B collusion and introduces their anti-trust law. China has to study their experience about regulating collusion.The sixth part proposes some recommends about B2B’s anti-trust regulation. By learning from the advanced legislation of Europe and America and combining current environment of China, the paper provides the thoughts of identification, enforcement and prevention on B2B’s price collusion, and recommends building incentive mechanism and establishment of the declaration of censorship.