Digital Economy

In light of the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and recent debates about the socio-political implications of large-language models and chatbots, Manuel Wörsdörfer analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), the world’s first comprehensive attempt by a government body to address and mitigate the potential negative impacts of AI technologies. He recommends areas where the AIA could be improved.

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.

Recent European digital regulation surrenders traditional key guideposts of European competition law and policy. The over-centralization of European Union antitrust authority and EU legislation risks undermining member state laws and competences. This may privilege platforms and eventually harm competition and consumers, writes Jörg Hoffmann.

Friso Bostoen’s new book, Abuse of Platform Power: Leveraging Conduct in Digital Markets under EU Competition Law and Beyond, outlines how antitrust agencies and policymakers should tackle market power in the platform economy. The following is an adaptation of the book’s introduction.

Does investing in information technology (IT) enable firms to “scale without mass” and increase their market share? In a new paper, Erik Brynjolfsson, Wang Jin, and Xiupeng Wang examine how IT affects firm size, market concentration, and the labor share of revenue.

The last half-century has witnessed an explosion of technology changing how the financial landscape functions for customers and new and legacy banking providers alike....

Traditional accounts of the growing power of large firms implicate antitrust or political corruption. But in a recent book, economist James Bessen puts the...

Even when antitrust enforcers and courts get it right when finding an anticompetitive infringement, they constantly end up imposing remedies that are inadequate to...

How did the internet evolve from a relatively decentralized, hybrid, and democratizing space toward a concentrated, privatized environment controlled by a handful of actors?...

The rise of digital platforms has upended markets and the very act of market definition—the basic unit of antitrust analysis. With the review of...