Regulations of Private Companies' Trade Policies: Theory, Practice and Recommendations for Antitrust

This article examines applied and theoretical aspects of the anti-monopoly regulations applied to private companies' trade policies and it shows available alternative instruments of antitrust policy and options for regulating companies' trade practices. The article presents the possible impacts anti-monopoly regulations have on companies' trade practices in the context of choice of mechanism of transaction governance. The paper demonstrates that emerging practice of antimonopoly regulations shows evidence of a bias of the Russian antitrust toward economic regulation. One of the results of the implementation of the regulations of companies' trade practices is the effect of "creeping regulation". The intervention of the anti-monopoly service in any company's operations might be the result of substitution of its object: instead of the protection and development of conditions for competition the antimonopoly agency protects the interests of some consumer groups, providing for their demand and satisfaction of contract terms and trading conditions with partners. Using the tools of the transaction costs economics has made it possible to indicate the effect of shrinking of structural alternatives for transaction governance.