| In the case of price monopoly in the insurance industry in Loudi City,Hunan Province,Ruite Insurance Brokerage Company plays a hub role in the implementation of monopoly agreement,but it is not subject to the Antitrust Law.The penalty results of this case reveal that the traditional dichotomy has the disadvantages in the regulation of the hub-and-spoke monopoly agreements.The subject signed by the hub-and-spoke monopoly agreements includes both the operators with competitive relations and the operators with the upstream and downstream industrial chains,which are compound monopoly agreements that intersects the horizontal monopoly agreements and the vertical monopoly agreements.In China’s existing the Antitrust Law enforcement practice,the traditional dichotomy only involves the illegal analysis of horizontal monopoly agreements and vertical monopoly agreements,and can not cover the hub-and-spoke monopoly agreements.This paper makes a soft distinction between per se rule and the rule of reason,subdivides its per se rule into its own illegal presumption and the illegal presumption to prove the elements,and divides the rule of reason into rebuttable presumption of law and reasonable presumption.From the angle of the distribution of bargaining power between the hubs and the spokes,the type analysis of the hub-and-spoke monopoly agreements will be categorized,so as to improve the antitrust analysis path of the hub-and-spoke monopoly agreements. |
