The Australian Competition And Consumer Commission (ACCC)

Multiple consumer protection agencies or independent bodies can assist consumers to resolve their complaints and provide advice about consumer related matters. Two of which are NSW Fair Trading and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

Monopolies and oligopolies often use anti-competitive practices, which can have a negative impact on the economy. This is why company mergers are often examined closely by government regulators to avoid reducing competition in an industry.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines anti-competitive practices as the many ways firms restrict inter-firm competition to maintain or to increase their relative market position and profits without necessarily providing goods and services at a lower price or at a higher quality. The American Federal Trade Commission states that anti-competitive practices include activities such as price fixing, group boycotts and exclusionary exclusive dealings. These activities are generally grouped as agreements between competitors (horizontal conduct) and monopolization (single firm conduct).

An offeror will have made an offer where it appears to a reasonable person in the position of the offeree that an offer was intended.

Antitrust laws are federal and state government laws that regulate the conduct and organization or businesses. This helps promote fair competition for consumers. There are four main areas involving the

When consumers decide to purchase a product or service a car, a new refrigerator, or prescription drugs, the goal of the antitrust laws is to make sure their choices are not restricted unreasonably. Consumer choice is a powerful incentive for the sellers of any products to keep their prices low and their quality high. When the antitrust laws are vigorously enforced, businesses must respond to what consumers want. A business that ignores consumer wishes, by refusing either to keep prices competitive or to offer

The most efficient way for consumers to get what they want is through the ‘market’, not the government, but businesses have more power than their customers. Some businesses can and will use abuse this power and cheat and steal from consumers to make money. Because of this, the government regulates the behaviour of businesses to have a market economy that functions properly. These laws mainly protect consumers against; misleading/deceptive representations, unconscionable conduct, unfair contracts, and unsafe goods and/or services. To protect consumers, different legal and non-legal approaches have been taken.

The scope of this paper is to break down and define social regulation, industrial regulation, and natural monopolies by explaining how they have impacted society and why they exist. It is also the intent to summarize the Antitrust Laws, explain the major functions of the five primary federal regulatory commissions that govern social regulation, and identify three main regulatory commissions of industrial regulation.

Antitrust law in the United States is a collection of federal and state government laws regulating the conduct and organization of business corporations with the intent to promote fair competition in an open-market economy for the benefit of the public. Congress passed the first antitrust statute, the Sherman Antitrust Act, in 1890 in response to the public outrage toward big business. In 1914, Congress passed two additional antitrust laws: the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Act. (The Antitrust Laws. Web.)

The first antitrust law passed by Congress was the Sherman Act, in 1890. In 1914, Congress passed two other antitrust laws: The Federal Trade Commission Act, which created the Federal Trade Commission, and the Clayton Act. With some revisions, these are the most important federal antitrust laws still in effect today. Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers and acquisitions when the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly." (ftc.gov) The antitrust laws proscribe unlawful mergers and business practices in general terms, leaving courts to decide which ones are illegal based on the facts of each case. For over 100 years, the antitrust laws have had the same basic objective: to protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, making sure there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up. The enforcement authorities of the federal antitrust laws are The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division (ftc.gov).

This essay will review the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (as amended) (‘CPUTs’) to assess how they are responsible for the operation of the Internal Market and consider whether the CPUTs have accomplished its objective of consumer protection. This essay will first explain the Internal Market and the significance of regulation and then proceed to demonstrate how the CPUTs enable the Internal Market to function properly and its protection of consumers.

Studmaster Pty Ltd was a landlord that owned a shopping complex in Bourke Street, Melbourne. Mrs Tran operated the “Vietnamese Lunch Box” outlet in the food court. She had little ability to speak or read English, which the representatives for Studmaster knew about. Studmaster proposed a three year renewal of her lease at $48,000 per annum plus GST for the first year and CPI increments in the second and third years.

Competition in economics is rivalry in supplying or acquiring an economic service or good. Sellers compete with other sellers, and buyers with other buyers. In its perfect form, there is competition among many small buyers and sellers, none of whom is too large to affect the market as a whole; in practice, competition is often reduced by a great variety of limitations, including monopolies. The monopoly, a limit on competition, is an example of market failure. Competition among merchants in foreign trade was common in ancient times, and it has been a characteristic of mercantile and industrial expansion since the Middle Ages. By the 19th century, classical economic theorists had come to regard

This essay will analyse the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (‘CRA 2015’) as it is a significant element of the government’s reform of consumer law in the UK. The Act has been lauded as an immense upheaval of consumer law due to the integration of eight existing pieces of legislation into one. The complicated regulations regarding goods and services that consumers and businesses struggle to comprehend will no longer apply under the Act.

One major objective of mergers is to be able to reduce or fully eliminate the weaknesses that may exit in