Biography: Competition Economics

Mattias Ganslandt (PhD, Lund University, Sweden) is the president and managing director of the Center for European Law and Economics (CELEC). He is also an associate professor of economics at the School of Economics and Management (EHL), Lund University. He is an expert on market design, pricing strategy, the economics of intellectual property rights and competition policy in international markets.

Dr Ganslandt is the founder of several web-based research projects including Talkstandards.com, an expert community analysing global ICT-standardisation, Mergerdata.net, a research project devoted to fact-finding and analysis of international merger control, and Tpaforum.net, a project designed to provide facts-based analysis about third party access.

He has been a tenured associate professor of economics at Lund University and a visiting professor of economics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Prior to that, he was a research programme director at The Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm 2000-2006. Dr Ganslandt served a four-year term as secretary general of the Swedish Economic Association, 2002 to 2006.

Dr Ganslandt's research is focused on microeconomic theory, intellectual property rights, antitrust and international competition. In his research he has made contributions to the theory of vertical restraints in international markets and business strategies to segment geographical markets, including vertical price control, exclusive territories and endogenous barriers to parallel trade. He has empirically investigated the welfare effects of international competition and arbitrage, for instance in the pharmaceutical sector and in selected retail markets. In his research he has also analysed collusion, both theoretically and empirically, for instance the role of strategic uncertainty and the role of symmetry for coordinated effects of mergers.

Dr Ganslandt's experience and expertise in antitrust economics covers different areas of competition policy, including both theoretical and empirical analysis of regulation of energy markets, public procurement, state aid, relevant markets, competitive effects of mergers and joint ventures, effects of cartels and concerted practices, exploitive abuse of dominance, exclusionary conduct, vertical restraints, telecommunication regulation, parallel trade and misuse of intellectual property rights.

He has worked as an independent consultant for international organisations (eg the World Bank, OECD), private companies, law firms and government agencies and analysed economic issues in a number of industries, including power generation, renewable energy, electricity distribution, district heating, district cooling, luxury goods, pharmaceuticals, broadcasting, public procurement, petroleum, chemicals, retail and distribution, paper, metals, autos, software, ferry operations, mobile telecommunications, airlines, non-alcoholic beverages. In these projects he has applied various methods, including equilibrium analysis of oligopoly behaviour (game theory models), theoretical equilibrium analysis of relevant alternatives, structural demand models, simulation of mergers and acquisitions, time series analysis, panel regressions, estimation of spatial models, statistical tests of competing hypotheses. He has also testified as an economic expert before several courts, including the District Court in Stockholm, the Swedish Market Court, the District Court in Ystad and the Court of Appeals in Skåne-Blekinge.

He has also been a lecturer of competition and antitrust economics at the Masters programme for European Law at Stockholm University Law School. In addition, he has been a speaker at IBC Euroforum, VJS, Stockholm's School of Economics Executive Education and at several law firms on topics related to the law and economics of competition policy.