The legal and economic significance of barriers to market entry

Valentin Mircea
Additional contact information
Valentin Mircea: Founding Partner, SCA Mircea și Asociații (Bucharest Bar)

Romanian Competition Journal, 2026, vol. 6, issue 1, 66-71

Abstract: The concept of a barrier to entry occupies a paradoxical position in competition law: it is an indispensable element of proof in defining the relevant market, in assessing dominance, and in merger control, yet its definition remains contested at the level of economic doctrine. This article argues that the conceptual ambivalence — the still-unresolved Bain–Stigler controversy, refined by Demsetz, von Weizsäcker, and Carlton — explains the oscillation of decisional practice between structural and dynamic approaches. The article examines the heterogeneous evidentiary functions of barriers within the architecture of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU and Regulation 139/2004, their reception in case-law (from Hoffmann-La Roche to Google Shopping and Google Android), and the transformation brought about by the Digital Markets Act. The conclusion proposes a non-contradiction test: the legally relevant barrier is one which, when prudently assessed, does not contradict the actual dynamics of the market. The treatment of barriers in digital markets and the ex ante logic of the DMA constitute the most instructive contemporary manifestation of the structural tension between the economic construction and the legal use of the concept.

Keywords: barriers to entry; relevant market; dominance; digital markets; dma. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.revistadeconcurenta.ro/pdfjs/web/viewe ... 3206#zoom=page-width https://www.revistadeconcurenta.ro/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=/?attachment_id=3212#zoom=page-width

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:rocojo:023791

DOI: 10.58276/RCJ.2026.1.3

Access Statistics for this article

Romanian Competition Journal is currently edited by Florin Andrei

More articles in Romanian Competition Journal from Consiliul Concurenței Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mihail Busu ().