For decades, antitrust lawyers were cautioned against invoking “Fairness” in competition law and economics analysis. However, fairness has long underpinned market regulation, from ancient laws like the Code of Hammurabi to modern rules against unfair pricing and exploitation, such as Article 102 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Historically, societies have imposed limits on excessive pricing and abuse of market power, especially during times of scarcity and crisis. In today’s digital economy, traditional ex post enforcement, such as cases against Google, Meta, Amazon or Apple, often struggles to keep pace with rapid market developments and leads to lengthy investigations at times lasting decades. This lag has spurred calls for ex ante regulatory frameworks, with fairness and equitable exchange re-emerging as guiding principles. Recent EU legislative efforts, including the Digital Markets Act (DMA), explicitly emphasize fairness already in their title, aiming for contestable markets and equitable value distribution. The COVID-19 pandemic further reignited debates over unfair pricing, revealing tensions between neoclassical economic models and fairness-oriented enforcement grounded in real-world conditions. These developments mark a broader shift: the reintroduction and evolution of fairness within regulatory instruments such as the DMA, the AI Act, the Data Act and so on. This paper argues that the reintegration of fairness offers a necessary corrective to outdated legal-economic paradigms displaying an undue influence over Union law, and calls for rethinking of competition law and policy to meet the challenges of crisis-prone digital and global antitrust enforcement, especially in light of legal-historic and behavioural economic perspectives on unfair pricing. Following a brief introduction, framing the problem of unfair pricing and exploitative abuses, as well as the crisis of neoclassical economics paired with COVID-19 crisis, the second section investigates the said crisis in light of Union competition law and policy and legal-historic perspectives on unfair pricing and the role of the Sovereign. The third section depicts some legal-economic approaches to the matter of fairness and fairness in pricing. The fourth section recasts an empirical inquiry into European approaches to unfair pricing during COVID-19 crisis as a proxy. The fifth section connects the ex-ante regulation of fairness, with ex-post approaches to unfair pricing within Union competition law. The sixth section concludes.

During times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers and the public reveal a strong preference for fairness in pricing even when that would reduce efficiency. For example, they support the application of price gouging laws that prevent prices for necessities from skyrocketing but probably also dampen incentives for firms to produce more and alleviate the shortage. More generally, a growing body of research reveals that consumers have a strong preference for fairness over wealth maximization. This suggests that in making price policy, governments should abandon neoclassical economics and its wealth maximization criterion in favor of an approach that treats fairness in pricing as a first principle and paramount value. The chapter considers the implications of this "neo-Kantian" approach to price policy for antitrust law and policy in particular.

The present article explores the implication of fairness as a regulatory and competition law concept applied to digital and Artificial Intelligence markets, in light of recent law and policy developments targeting the interaction between data, market power and competition law. Much of the policy discussions, legislative proposals as well some emerging case law elevate the matter of “fairness” in the context of digital markets and AI, creating both a novel regulatory framework as well as encouraging competition law to curb “unfairness” of said markets and related “unfair practices”. The interface between intellectual property rights and competition law is of utmost importance in this context, where we might find similar analogous insights as we can find regarding the matter of fairness within traditional EU competition law. Further, the question remains whether the “fairness norm” expressed in regulatory acts such Digital Markets Act, EU AI Act and the EU Data Act are akin to the “fairness” norms found in Union competition law, mainly under Article 102 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

Objectives: Better engagement of diverse groups of interest-holders in the development of health guidelines has been proposed to improve their usefulness, implementability, and acceptability. Guidelines shape clinical or public health practice decision-making. Trustworthy guidelines are systematically developed documents that include actionable statements based on evidence and a formal, structured and transparent decision process. This paper describes the Guidelines International Network (GIN)-McMaster Guideline Development Checklist (GDC) Extension for Engagement to assist developers with engaging multiple interest-holders throughout all topics of guideline development. Study Design and Setting: To produce this checklist extension, we conducted a 3-phase mixed methods study. First, we identified 10 groups of interest-holders to be engaged in health guideline development: patients, the public, providers, program managers, principal investigators, payers/purchasers of health services, payers/funders of health research, policymakers, peer-reviewed journal editors, and product makers identified in previous work and recruited coleads to represent these groups (n = 26 total). Results: We conducted a series of reviews to identify existing methods and barriers/facilitators for engagement, approaches to managing conflicts of interest, and describe the impacts of engagement on the guideline development process. The results of these reviews informed the development of an online survey for which we received 195 responses. We clarified these results through 43 key informant interviews with interest-holders. The final GDC extension checklist was determined based on consensus methods with our coleads. Conclusion: This paper presents the GIN-McMaster GDC Extension for Engagement. This checklist provides interest-holder–informed recommendations for providing advice/feedback or participating in decision-making in guideline development. Plain Language Summary: Health-care guidelines are formal recommendations for diagnosing and managing medical conditions or public health concerns. The steps involved in developing guidelines include from planning the process, defining the focus of the guideline and the questions it should answer, and summarizing the evidence. The Guidelines International Network-McMaster Guideline Development checklist includes 146 steps of guideline development grouped into 18 topics. Our work extends this checklist to provide guidance on how to engage with people from different groups of ‘interest-holders’ throughout guideline development. These interest-holders include (1) patients, (2) members of the public, (3) health-care providers, (4) people who manage and operate health programs, (5) researchers, (6) people who pay for or purchase health services, (7) policymakers, (8) people who pay for health research, (9) people who publish research and guidelines, and (10) people who develop and sell health-care devices or products. We engaged with people from each of the groups to develop this guidance. Twenty-six people coled our interest-holder groups. We conducted a series or systematic reviews on (a) how to engage people in guidelines, (b) identifying the barriers and facilitators to engagement, (c) assessing the impacts of engagement, and (d) describing how to manage conflicts of interest related to engagement. These reviews were used to create a first draft of guidance. Then we conducted an online survey and gathered the opinions from 195 people from each of our interest-holder groups. We interviewed 43 interest-holders for additional information to revise the guidance and then finalized the guidance with our interest-holder coleads. This checklist provides guidance for engaging interest-holder groups throughout guideline development.

Whilst artificial intelligence tools are already have significant impacts upon academic education, our starting point as scholars should always be to first ask: why do we provide academic education? The practices, values, and rationale contained in however you answer that question provide the guidelines by which to relate to AI. The Social Sciences and Humanities are comparatively well-placed in the ‘AI age’ because critical thinking, an area in which our subjects excel, is seen as one of the core human skills AI cannot automate. 

Whilst AI risks undermining the validity of many exams through enabling easier plagiarism, misuse of the technology most threatens our education wherever it accelerates loneliness and a disconnect between students and lecturers through replacing human communication. We therefore need to put new resources into building academic communities amongst students and lecturers.

Take-home papers as a form of examination are under threat but we still need to train students’ writing skills. Colleagues are now shifting to sit-down exams, but to protect writing skills we need time for in-person academic discussion to assess students’ learning, e.g. also if they’ve written a text. Increasing space for in-person academic discussion forms part of a bigger goal to build and strengthen our academic learning communities within each programme so students do not feel isolated and alone with AI.

Recent years have seen the dominance of neoclassical, marginalist and welfarist schools of Competition Law and Economics being challenged more vigorously than ever [See two major collecting works in: Fennell and McAdams (2013) and Cappelen and Tungodden (2019)]. Although the core assumptions of the neoclassical school regarding overt reliance on rationality and efficiency ever since the inception of the school have been target of much criticism [Flynn (December 1988), pp. 713–43 and Dworkin (1980), pp. 191–226], the latest decades of both research and real life developments have reinvigorated the criticim [An indication is the title of the latest Global Competition Forum, themed “Time for a Reset?”, see here: http://www.oecd.org/competition/globalforum/GFC-2020-agenda-en.pdf, accessed 2020-12-07]. Nowhere is the influence of neoclassical and marginalist economic approaches, in turn underscored by Legal Realism and Legal Positivist approaches, more prevalent, than laws governing economic activities, chief among them antitrust law and policy. The famous “Antitrust Revolution” in the late 70s by the likes of Robert Bork (1978) and Richard Posner (2014) still today dominates mainstream law and economics of not only US Antitrust law, but also of European [Bartalevich (2016), pp. 267–83] and global competition law [Stiglitz (2017)]. Leaving behind decades long (and one would say, centuries long) fairness-related approaches to law and economics [Watkins (1922)] (which in this article will be dubbed Kantian although the core philosophy predates Kant by eons), we now also note insights in bounded rationality [Piron and Fernandez (1995)], which further underscore the previous theoretical and philosophical approaches. Using the legal prohibition against “unfair pricing” as an optimal proxy [See e.g. Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union Article 102a, prohibiting unfair pricing imposed by a dominant undertaking capable of affecting trade between member states or in substantial part of the Union; See also Kianzad and Minssen (2018), pp. 133–48], the present article juxtaposes the neoclassical and marginalist approaches to this area of political economy, by way of using Kantian ethics and Kantian legal philosophy to demonstrate the inaptness of the so-called mainstream Law and Economics approaches to the matter “fairness in law and economics”. A return to Kantian philosophy of law [White (2019), pp. 53–76] and a balanced approach between law and economics disciplines, more so regarding laws governing economic activity, is forwarded, making the case that whether one is Kantian or Utilitarian in the normative will invariably affect the substantive positive legal and economic analysis. This fact is independent of the claims to “rationality”, “objectivity” or “humanity” and “divinity” made by either approach. Following the introduction framing the “paradox” regarding the return of Kantian, fairness-based approaches to law and economics, the second section depicts the Posnerian attack on Kant construed alongside Wealth Maximisation as an optimal goal of law and economics. The third section describes the supposed division between fairness and welfare, or efficiency, as an optimal goal of law and economics. The fourth section in turn constructs the Kantian comeback. The fifth section concludes.

Compulsory licensing refers to a situation in which a non-exclusive license of an intellectual property right (‘IPR’) can be granted by a competent authority to a third party to make, use or sell an invention, where remuneration is paid to the right-holder and the right-holder maintains its legal intellectual property rights. Thus, Compulsory Licensing represents an exception to the normal exclusivity enjoyed by a right-holder.

The COVID-19 crisis intensified decade-long debates on the interaction between intellectualproperty rights (IPRs), competition law and access to affordable life-saving treatments andvaccines. Compulsory licensing of patented medicines is a tried-and-tested method to expandaccess, particularly in a situation of “national emergency or other circumstances of extremeurgency” within the meaning of Article 31(b) of the TRIPS Agreement. Some legislations, suchas European competition law, offer a toolbox for curbing the exercise of IPRs if they would befound in conflict with certain competition rules, such as rules prohibiting excessive pricing bydominant undertakings. The paper analyses the interface between intellectual property lawand competition law in general, moving on to the settled case law of the Court of Justice ofthe European Union (CJEU) on this matter. It provides a general overview of legal andeconomics arguments related to excessive pricing prohibition and the main case law ofEuropean competition law on the matter and discusses whether compulsory licensing as aremedy against excessive pricing of patented life-saving pharmaceutical products can be aviable and appropriate remedy. Finally, the report offers policy recommendations relating tocompulsory licensing based on excessive pricing

The prohibition against excessive pricing dates back to the years of Babylonian King Hammurabi. Nevertheless, the prohibition is described by many as being “controversial” and against “mainstream economics”, which is why it should be applied rather sparsely. It has also rather routinely been claimed that the actual number of excessive pricing cases is “scarce”, “limited” and so on. Despite the historical roots, and even though the prohibition represents what many laypeople (and scholars) would understand as the prima facie function of competition law, the prohibition in many textbooks and commentary is still described as an “oddity.” This assertion, although recurrent in certain judgments and political documents, is quantitatively false. As this article concludes, cases of excessive prices in European competition law are not rare. Without being exhaustive, this article reports 28 cases at the European level and 99 cases at the national level between 1971 and 2021.

Established in 2015, the Multi-Stakeholder Engagement (MuSE) Consortium is an international network of over 120 individuals interested in stakeholder engagement in research and guidelines. The MuSE group is developing guidance for stakeholder engagement in the development of health and healthcare guideline development. The development of this guidance has included multiple meetings with stakeholders, including patients, payers/purchasers of health services, peer review editors, policymakers, program managers, providers, principal investigators, product makers, the public, and purchasers of health services and has identified a number of key issues. These include: (1) Definitions, roles, and settings (2) Stakeholder identification and selection (3) Levels of engagement, (4) Evaluation of engagement, (5) Documentation and transparency, and (6) Conflict of interest management. In this paper, we discuss these issues and our plan to develop guidance to facilitate stakeholder engagement in all stages of the development of health and healthcare guideline development.