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Operation Strategy Quality Measures

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Submitted By ashwaniiim
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The Role and Measurement of Quality in
Competition Analysis
2013
The OECD Competition Committee discussed the role and measurement of quality in competition analysis in June 2013. This document contains an executive summary of that debate and the documents from the meeting: an analytical note by the OECD staff and written submissions: Australia, Canada, Chile, the European Union, Indonesia, Japan,
Mexico, Portugal, United Kingdom, Ukraine, United States and BIAC. A note by Theodore
Voorhees Jr. as well as a detailed summary of the discussion are also included.

Competition policy is just as concerned with quality as it is with prices. While the importance of quality is undisputed and issues about quality are mentioned pervasively in competition agency guidelines and court decisions, there is no widely-agreed framework for analysing it which often renders its treatment superficial.
There are a number of reasons why in practice, courts and competition authorities rarely analyse quality effects as rigorously as they analyse price effects. First, quality is a subjective concept and therefore much harder to define and measure than prices. In addition, microeconomic theory offers little help in predicting how changes in the level of competition in a market will affect quality and it is usually up to empirical analysis to determine how quality will change in response to varying degrees of competition in the context of particular markets.
Given difficulties in terms of the evaluation of quality factors, particularly in quantitative assessment, competition agencies end up using qualitative tools such as customer surveys and interviews, to assess quality where necessary. While experience with the implementation of quantitative econometric techniques is rather limited, they may become more readily applicable and widely used in the future. At the level of competition

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