Victoria Daskalova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of European Law in Utrecht University. Her work explores the question of how competition law and regulation can be applied to monopsony and superior bargaining power, unfair business-to-business practices, and economic dependency. The field of application for these issues is, among others, agri-food supply chains and labour markets.
Specifically, her work addresses questions such as: how competition law should deal with types of economic power that escape our standard definitions of a dominant position? What regulatory issues plague the attempt to fix unfair business-to-business practices in supply chains? How should competition law be applied to labour markets?
Victoria has acted as an expert on these topics for, among others, the European Commission, the Joint Research Center, the OECD, and the Japanese Fair Trade Commission.
Additionally, Victoria is broadly interested in other themes and topics related to economic fairness, social justice, sustainability, innovation and equality. She has been involved in research projects related to gender and energy, standardization, sustainability, and new technologies (drones).
Victoria has been a visiting scholar at Melbourne Law School in Australia and Hannan University in Osaka, Japan. She is the recipient of various scholarships and awards, including, most recently, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS/KNAW) Institute Gak fellowship to further her work on labour rights and competition law. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Tilburg Law Review and Articles Editor at the German Law Journal.
Originally from Bulgaria, Victoria obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Duke University (North Carolina, USA) thanks to a merit scholarship from the Robertson Scholarship programme. She continued her education at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where she completed the Master of Laws programme in International and European Law and the Master of Legal Research (both cum laude). In 2016, she defended her PhD thesis on the topic of monopsony power and EU antitrust law. Victoria holds a qualification in Dutch law (civiel effect), also from Tilburg University.
Victoria is always eager to connect with civil society and stakeholders and engage in public debate on the topics of her research. She is fluent in Bulgarian, English, and Dutch, proficient in Spanish and (to a more limited extent) in French.