Legal tests for excessive pricing and their implementation under China's anti-monopoly law

China's anti-monopoly law prohibits undertakings from abusing their dominant market position by charging excessively high customer prices. Nevertheless, objectively determining if a price is too high is not easy. The law entrusts the antitrust authorities with deciding which tests to use to assess the price excessiveness. The authorities published provisions that set out a few quantitative tests they intend to use when deciding excessive pricing cases so that undertakings could comply with the law. These provisions include a fallback clause indicating that the authorities could employ tests unspecified in the provisions. When making decisions, authorities rely heavily on these unspecified tests, which are based on the fallback clause. Hence, to gain a comprehensive understanding of the excessive pricing regime in China, one must refer not only to the statutes but also to the authorities’ penalty decisions. To clarify on this uncertainty, this article reviewed the relevant precedents decided since the AML came into effect in August 2008 and until October 2024 and prepared summary statistics for the tests used. Moreover, this article identified issues related to the implementation of tests for excessive pricing and offered suggestions to the country. © 2024 The Author(s)