id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-323769-2a8cbuh2	Boshoff, Willem H.	South African competition policy on excessive pricing and its relation to price gouging during the COVID‐19 disaster period	2020-09-29		.txt	text/plain	12354	527	40	As discussed later, changes in consumer behaviour during the disaster period -including increased search costs and/or higher valuation of particular product characteristics -may reduce demand-side substitutes and increase the unilateral pricing power of firms -at least in certain types of market (Frank, 2020) . The focus on shorter horizons to assess market power has therefore facilitated an expanded scope of South African competition policy during the COVID-19 disaster, especially in relation to excessive pricing. Where the disaster period does not raise such additional concerns (perhaps in cases featuring local geographic markets, which allow price comparisons with, for example, nearby markets), intertemporal comparisons continue to offer more appropriate benchmarks for COVID-19-related investigations, for the reason discussed above. This advantage of the intertemporal benchmark is even more important in the context of COVID-19 cases, where changes in the willingness-to-pay is at the heart of excessive-pricing investigations: as argued earlier, changes in the willingness-to-pay underlies increased market power and its potential abuse during the disaster period.	./cache/cord-323769-2a8cbuh2.txt	./txt/cord-323769-2a8cbuh2.txt