The aims of EU competition law are contested. The mainstream view that competition law prohibits conduct that harms consumer welfare leads to discussion about the proper economic approach to apply. EU competition law has often been applied in ways that address other public policy considerations, presently focusing on promoting digital markets and a green agenda. The procedures to apply competition law must safeguard the fundamental rights of undertakings and the Court of Justice has helped shape the degree of protection as well as the right to a robust judicial review of Commission decisions. Since 2004, national competition authorities have been tasked with applying EU competition law. Cooperation among national authorities and the Commission is facilitated by the European Competition Network and the ECN+ Directive has conferred on each national competition authorities the same enforcement powers that the Commission enjoys. Each national authority focuses on cases that affect its jurisdiction, the Commission retaining responsibility for cross-border infringements. Private enforcement has been facilitated by the EU legislature and a system of collective redress by which consumers secure compensation is emerging slowly in some jurisdictions.

This chapter brings together ideas from earlier chapters on decision-making and integrates them with perspectives from evolutionary economics to analyze the process of structural change. It begins with a neo-Marshallian view of the competitive process and price setting in a mature industry, which is then extended to consider how selection processes work when an industry is disrupted by customers switching to different products or the uptake of innovative production systems. This leads to a view of industries as being akin to sporting leagues in which the winners can increasingly dominate unless new entrants or less-successful firms can fight back despite smaller profits by rewriting the rules of the game. The uptake of new concepts is analyzed via Dopfer et al.’s “micro–meso–macro framework,” in which a “meso” is a generic concept that firms apply in different “micro” ways, often triggering much wider “macro” changes (e.g., impacts of smartphone apps) but where adoption can be delayed by deal-breaker issues with initial versions and other sources of resistance to change. Finally, the chapter examines how shifting corporate politics shapes how bold firms are in making innovations and how the changing distribution of knowledge in an industry affects the division of labor between firms.