Information Sharing in Competition Policy - OECD Presentation

INFORMATION SHARING IN COMPETITION POLICY OVERVIEW OF SECRETARIAT BACKGROUND NOTE 149th meeting of the Competition Committee OECD Competition Division

Paris, 24 June 2026

Contents

• Intro • Economic, benefits, risk and context • Competition enforcement and advocacy • Conclusion

2

Economic overview Information sharing

• Benefits • How circumstances shape risk – Market structure and context – Characteristics of the information itself – How information is transmitted and processed

• Impact of new technologies

Reduces uncertainty

Efficiency gains

Co-ordination risk

3

Legal treatment: three settings • Used to design, implement or monitor collusion (support cartel stability)

Part of a broader cartel

• Assessed as part of the cartel infringement

• Increasingly treated as a competition concern in its own right

Enforcement practice

Standalone information exchange

• Key question: by object or per se treatment VS effects-based assessment?

• Assessment: characteristics of exchange + market context

Growing importance!

Ancillary to horizontal co-operation

• May be necessary for legitimate co-operation (R&D, standard-setting, benchmarking, sustainability initiatives)

• Key questions: necessity, proportionality and safeguards 4

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

•

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

Guidance & advocacy

5

Conclusions 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.

Heuristics are evolving

Standalone gaining prominence

Intermediaries and technology matter

Guidance remains essential

Aggregated, historical or public information may still be competitively significant

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 6

Access the OECD note and all documents from this roundtable at oe.cd/iscp