INFORMATION SHARING IN COMPETITION POLICY
OVERVIEW OF SECRETARIAT BACKGROUND NOTE
149th meeting of the Competition Committee
OECD Competition Division Paris, 24 June 2026
Intro
Economic, benefits, risk and context
Competition enforcement and advocacy
Conclusion
Economic overview
Benefits • How circumstances shape risk
– Market structure and context
– Characteristics of the information itself
– How information is transmitted and processed • Impact of new technologies
Legal treatment: three settings
Enforcement practice
Part of a broader cartel
• Used to design, implement or monitor collusion (support cartel stability)
• Assessed as part of the cartel infringement
• Increasingly treated as a competition concern in its own right
Standalone information exchange
Growing importance!
Ancillary to horizontal co-operation
• Key question: by object or per se treatment VS effects-based assessment?
• Assessment: characteristics of exchange + market context
• May be necessary for legitimate co-operation (R&D, standard-setting, benchmarking, sustainability initiatives)
• Key questions: necessity, proportionality and safeguards
Intermediaries, technology and guidance
Trade associations
• Common setting for structured, repeated interaction between competitors. Legitimate functions (advocacy, statistics, standards) but also increased coordination risk + recurring enforcement
• Key safeguards: aggregation, anonymisation, time lags, access restrictions to raw data
Digital channels and algorithms
Guidance & advocacy
• May replicate or intensify informational effects: more continuous, granular and actionable than traditional intermediaries
• Hub-and-spoke concern: a shared pricing algorithm or data intermediary can act as the hub of a collusive scheme. Key legal questions: intermediary liability, awareness/attribution
• Well-designed guidance can help firms navigate exchanges, especially in recurring settings such as trade associations. Trend away from fixed numeric safe harbours towards marketspecific, qualitative assessment
• Assess mandated disclosure regimes to avoid facilitating co-ordination
Conclusions
Heuristics are evolving
Aggregated, historical or public information may still be competitively significant
The competitive significance of information sharing cannot be determined by any single feature in isolation
Assessment depends on the interaction between the information, the channel, and the market context.
Standalone gaining prominence
Intermediaries and technology matter
Guidance remains essential
The key question is when the economic context justifies by-object or per se treatment, and when a fuller effects-based analysis is needed
Trade associations, platforms, data intermediaries and algorithmic tools can shape how information is structured, processed and used
Well-designed guidance can help firms and advisers navigate the complexity of information exchanges
Access the OECD note and all documents from this roundtable at oe.cd/iscp