As retail sector grows, large scale retailers have acquired buyer power that enables them to impose restrictions on suppliers or to change agreed contractual terms. By exercising buyer power, large scale retailers can extract supranormal economic bene...
As retail sector grows, large scale retailers have acquired buyer power that enables them to impose restrictions on suppliers or to change agreed contractual terms. By exercising buyer power, large scale retailers can extract supranormal economic benefits from suppliers.
Buyer power includes monopsony power, oligopsony power and even superior bargaining power that does not amount to the level of market power. Bargaining power means the power stemming from superior transactional position of large scale retailer in relation to the supplier. So it is necessary to distinguish the buyer power of retailer which has market power in the traditional antitrust sense from the buyer power of retailer which has superior transactional position but not dominant position.
Large scale retailers impose various vertical restraints on the supplier by exercising buyer power. Vertical restraints on the supplier can be divided into two categories depending on their effects. The first category is vertical restraints which have the effect of restricting competition in the market where the supplier belongs. And the second category is the type of vertical restraints by which the retailer forces the supplier to provide unreasonable economic benefits or put the supplier at an unreasonable disadvantage but not in the manner of restricting competition in the market.
Both Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act and Large-Scale Retailers’ Fair Trade Practices Act can be applied to the vertical restraints by large scale retailers. Different provisions are applied depending on the effect of vertical restraints. The types of vertical restrains mainly discussed in the regulation of large scale retailers are those in which retailer forces the supplier to provide unreasonable economic benefits or put the supplier at an unreasonable disadvantage. Whether those conducts are illegal are determined by the unfairness standard, but the unfairness standard is criticized as too unclear because it takes into consideration too many factors. Therefore, when we try to regulate the unfair vertical restraints imposed by large scale retailers, it is necessary to clarity the unfairness standard so as to minimize enforcement errors and to ensure the legitimacy of the regulation.
This thesis provides a standard to determine the existence of superior transactional position and an unfairness standard that would be helpful to identify unfair conducts that need to be regulated. Superior transactional position should be determined not by the formal factors such as size or overall capability of a business, but by the degree of economic dependence. To make sure that the unfairness standard does not encompass legitimate business practices, unfairness should be determined by, first, the prevalence of unfair business practices in the retail trade, second, the likelihood of recurrence, third, whether the damage, although small individually, is significant on the whole in respective of social welfare.
The prohibitions in the Large-Scale Retailers’ Fair Trade Practices Act generally satisfy this qualified standard of unfairness. Still Korean Fair Trade Commission or the courts need to take full account of the justifications proffered by large scale retailers to avoid false positive by overinclusive unfairness standard. To achieve consistency with regard to the illegality standard between specific conducts prescribed in the Large-Scale Retailers’ Fair Trade Practices Act, we need to further clarify the illegality standard of the forcing exclusive dealing. Also, we need to make provisions on the novel type of conducts such as listing fee, slotting allowance, special payment, margin support, delivery terms and customized presentation or labeling.