Determining the Product Boundaries of the Consumer Market in Order to Prevent Violations of Antitrust Laws

The current Procedure for analyzing the state of competition in the commodity market [10], operating on the concepts of retrospective and prospective analysis, does not note the difference between these studies, in particular when determining the product boundaries of the market and identifying interchangeable goods. The fair statement that the definition of product boundaries of the commodity market is based on the buyers’ opinion on the interchangeability of goods constituting one commodity group is not supported by a reflection of the difference in methods of identifying this opinion for retrospective and prospective periods. For any period, this type of methodology is assumed to be the same and relies heavily on the study of contractual and regulatory materials; all-Russian classifiers; commodity dictionaries or product reference books; expert opinions, since conducting consumer surveys gives reliable results for a small number of consumers, and with an increase in their number, sample surveys significantly depend on the representativeness of the sample, which, especially with an indefinite circle of people, is quite difficult to ensure. Therefore, there is always doubt that the sample produced contains all the main features of the population from which the sample is extracted, and these features are represented in approximately the same proportion or frequency as the feature appears in the population. This fully applies to the consumer market, the analysis of which during the sanctions period is becoming more and more relevant.
The author points out the presence of problems related to the lack of delineation of market analysis methods in retrospective and prospective periods and proposes a solution to the problem of an adequate retrospective analysis of the state of competition arising from this circumstance, which is in demand when initiating cases on the grounds of violation of a number of norms of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition”.
The author connects the ways to solve this problem with taking into account the statistical probability of purchasing goods and replacing the office analysis of interchangeability with the study of the behavior of the entire mass of buyers on the market without conducting sample surveys.
This solution, as the author points out, is true only for a large number of buyers, which is quite well implemented in consumer markets.

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