Research On The Definition Of Excessive Pricing

Excessive pricing is a typical form of abusing dominant market position.It means that the operator who has dominant market position abuse its dominant power to sell products or services to the counterparty at a price significantly above the competitive level.The law circles hold quite different views on whether it is necessary to regulate excessive pricing by Anti-Monopoly Law or not.The attitude towards anti-monopoly regulation of excessive pricing can be roughly divided into two categories around the world,namely,the non-regulation model represented by the United States and the prudent regulation model represented by the European Union.China’s Anti-Monopoly Law explicitly prohibits excessive pricing,but the relevant provisions are relatively principled and lack of operability,which brings difficulties to the law enforcement and judicial practice in judging the excessive pricing.At present,China’s anti-monopoly law enforcement agencies and judicial organs have formed some identification methods and judicial regulations by dealing with cases of excessive pricing,but there are still many problems.Among them,how to judge the price that the operator charge the counterparties is excessive has always been a difficult problem in theory and in practice.Excessive pricing damages the market competition and infringes the legitimate rights and interests of consumers and other operators,therefore,China’s anti-monopoly law enforcement agencies and judicial organs should regulate it.In order to solve the problems in the identification of excessive pricing,we can learn from the practical experience of other countries and improve it from three aspects:legislation,law enforcement and judicature.In legislation,we should clarify the constituent elements of excessive pricing,and increase the scope of plaintiffs in litigation about excessive pricing.In lawenforcement,the paper suggests to expand law enforcement scope of excessive pricing reasonably,and improving the method of determining unfair high prices to identify excessive pricing accurately.In the judicial practice,it can be perfected from three aspects:distribute the burden of proof in judicial determination of excessive pricing reasonably,investigation of the barriers to entry of relevant markets fully and evaluate the relative market power of operators.