Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Law, grade: 1, University of Linz, course: Bachelorseminar, language: English, abstract: According to Black's Law dictionary, competition is the struggle for commercial advantage. The efforts taken of companies to achieve the respective commercial advantages can be - especially in a free market economy - ample. Let's illustrate this fact by the following examples: Suppose that a automobile manufacturer, incensed by a car magazine's constant ridicule of its cars, launches a rival magazine with a similar name and layout, copies the other paper's stories, lures away the employees, advertisers and subscribers of the other magazine by offering them higher wages and lower advertising and subscribing rates and finally succeeds in running its critical opponent out of business. Has the automobile manufacturer engaged in any unfair trade practices for which the owners of the car magazine may seek legal remedy? Or has the manufacturer acted in a permissible way to the magazine's attack? Furthermore, could the magazine be said to have engaged in an unfair trade practice by permanently ridiculing the cars and its manufacturer2? How can a merger between two or more businesses which are on the same market level and which manufacture similar products in the same geographic region influence consumers? What if two competitors agree in the artificial setting of prices at a certain level, contrary to the workings of the free market? Do consumers have legal remedies against companies who engage in false advertising or who distribute faulty and dangerous goods? The body of law which deals with these subjects is known as competition law, which can broadly be divided into Consumer Protection Law and unfair trade practices on the one hand and antitrust-law on the other hand. The bachelor thesis at hand takes the reader to a journey through competition law with a special insight into Unfair Trade Practices. After the stud

"Unfair trading practices" is generally defined as consisting of deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise injurious conduct, referring to practices that directly affect consumers or competitors. In business-to-consumer relationships, unfair trading practices may involve misleading claims and advertising, conditional selling, excessive pricing, discriminatory pricing, and other misrepresentations. In business-to-business relationships, the prohibited conduct may be trade mark infringement, misappropriation, false advertising, bait-and-switch sales tactics, unauthorized substitution of brands of goods, use of confidential information by a former employee to solicit customers, theft of trade secrets, breach of a restrictive covenant, trade libel, and false representation of products or services. In this edition of the Comparative Law Yearbook of International Business, practicing lawyers from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union examine unfair trading practices in their respective jurisdictions.