Below-Cost Pricing On Online Marketplaces: A Comparative Reappraisal Of Predatory Pricing And Deep Discounting In India, The European Union, And The United States
- IJLLR Journal
- 13 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Nitish Kumar, Ph.D. Scholar, University Department of Law, Patna University, Patna
Dr. Shiv Shankar Singh, Associate Professor, University Department of Law, Patna University, Patna
ABSTRACT
Few features of the online economy trouble competition lawyers as persistently as the discount that seems too good to be true. Festival sales, cash-back, and coupons that push retail prices beneath a brick-and-mortar trader's own procurement cost look, to the shopper, like a gift; to the regulator, they raise the ancient worry that cheap prices now foreshadow dear prices later. This article revisits that worry as it plays out on digital marketplaces, and asks how three legal orders answer it. The argument is that the United States, the European Union, and India sit at different points on a single line running from restraint to intervention. American courts, bound by the recoupment requirement of Brooke Group, rarely condemn low prices at all. European law, working from the cost presumptions of AKZO and openly indifferent to proof of recoupment, reaches further. India sits in between: Section 4 of the Competition Act, 2002 supplies a modern definition of predatory price, but ties liability to a prior finding of dominance that the Competition Commission has, so far, declined to make against any marketplace. The result is a statute that reads well and bites little. Drawing on the comparative record, the article suggests that the Indian difficulty is one of market definition and analytical method rather than of drafting, and that discounting is better understood as one thread in a wider fabric of platform conduct than as a wrong to be judged on its own.
Keywords: predatory pricing; deep discounting; e-commerce; abuse of dominance; Section 4, Competition Act 2002; recoupment.
