3 Consulting
No less influential for Vickers' later career than his time at Shell was the serendipity of being invited in the summer of 1979 to assist on a consulting project by his undergraduate economics tutor at Oriel College, Derek Morris.
Morris, along with others, formed a very powerful team. They included Jeremy Lever QC and Carl Christian von Weizsacker, and other lawyers and economists, right at the frontiers of the modern theories of industrial organisation and regulation, who would also become lifelong friends. What brought the group together was the task of advising IBM on how best to prepare for a case that the company realised would later be brought against it, by the European Commission (EC). This was Vickers' first experience of economic consulting. The EC had alleged that IBM was employing anti-competitive practices, in contravention of the prohibition of abuse of market dominance in the Treaty of Rome. The team advising IBM had to furnish arguments to demonstrate that it really wasn't.In the end, the issue was eventually settled out of court. The multifaceted case provided the young Vickers with a window into a set of intriguing questions at the intersection of law, welfare economics and firms' behaviour. Probing the dynamics of competition would in due course come to frame a major part of his career, as researcher and no less, later on, as regulator. In 2008, Vickers wrote about the later Microsoft case in Competition Policy International (Vickers 2008).
One immediate consequence was meeting a member of the team, Jeremy Lever. Lever had been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, for over 20 years.
Having heard about Vickers' Finals results, Lever encouraged him to sit the examination for a Prize Fellowship there. Vickers did so and was duly elected. That was in November 1979. Vickers has retained his links with All Souls. Forty years later, he has already served as its Warden for over a decade.
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