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European competition policy in regard to vertical restraints is currently based on modern industrial economics. As regards vertical restraints, this influential economic approach has contributed to correcting the former, much less positive competition assessment of these practices, and has led to a considerable liberalization in the interpretation of European rules for exempting vertical agreements. This development can be viewed in light of a broader reform involving the whole of EU competition policy, which was triggered by the need for a more economics-based approach to competition issues. However, the European Commission's ”more economic” approach, which stresses welfare economics within neoclassical reasoning, widely neglects the impact market practices have on the innovation dimension of competition. This severe deficiency can be seen as part of a more general, still largely unresolved problem concerning how the innovation dimension can be significantly and adequately integrated into an analysis of competition. The solution to this problem will involve the carving out of relevant space in our economic assessment of market practices to make room for dynamic, or evolutionary, competition theories derived in particular from Austrian, Neo-Austrian, and innovation economics. The study's main concern is not a critique of the current mainstream economic approach to vertical restraints. Rather, it is a thorough investigation of whether and how evolutionary approaches can be used to derive additional arguments and to eventually develop new competition policy criteria for a more satisfactory assessment of vertical restraints. Although the analysis of vertical restraints from an evolutionary perspective is still new and underdeveloped, the present paper points to some new arguments that could play an important role in the assessment of competition in vertical restraints, both in order to justify these practices under certain conditions and to explain why they can hamper competition, particularly regarding competition as a process of experimentation. In this respect, an important result of this study is that it shows evolutionary approaches to competition as being capable of developing a different framework for the analysis of vertical relations among firms within the production and distribution chain and, consequently, for assessing the impact of those relations on the competition processes at different levels in the chain.