Competition, collusion, and confusion: The impact of current antitrust guidelines on competition

This paper considers how the proliferation of new collaborative relationshi ps presents a challenge for regulating agencies. Agencies' overriding conce rn is to protect the consumer, a potentially innocent bystander The lesson for those envisioning and planning strategic alliances, including supplier- researcher partnerships, is to know not only their prospective partners, bu r also to know the potential impact of prospective collaborations on custom ers and the consuming public in general. The authors go on to review the re sponse of regulatory, agencies and the new guidelines that these agencies a re using to preserve historic competition-related consumer benefits, while at the same time trying not to impact consumers from receiving additional b enefits that flow from strategic alliances. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. Ail rights reserved.