With European Union electricity markets moving away from legal monopolies and vertical integration towards a more competitive market design promoted from the top down, Member States' antitrust authorities have become a means of impacting the structuring the competitive behavior of electricity markets. This volume analyzes the challenges of using antitrust policy in this area. The two main goals of the work are to conduct an assessment of the strategy of the European Commission on long-term contracts within and across member states as revealed by antitrust cases and regulatory decisions and judged against economic theory and to consider the extent to which the outcome of EU antitrust enforcement is influenced by economic theory and what extent it can be explained by current dynamics of regulatory practice. Annotation ⓒ2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

General introduction 1 The problem of long-term contracts in decentralized electricity markets: an economic perspective 2 Vertical de-integration and single merket integration in the European Union: an incomplete transition 3 The antitrust strategy of the European Commission on domestic long-term contracts: is the new methodology truly 'more economic'? 4 Long-term contracts across Member States: the problem of priority access rights to interconnectors 5 The strategy of the European Union for the development of interconnectors: assessing the role of merchant transmission investment General conclusion Bibliography Index