This paper examines the economics of digital platforms and two-sided markets and discusses the economic conditions that underlie policy assertions by advocates of both interventionist and laissez-faire policies. We include applications to internet search, online advertising, media, data, and...

The aim of this chapter is to analyze recently released reports and policy papers to evaluate whether regulatory interventions reflect the distinctive features of digital markets and their leading players or whether the main thrust of these proposals for regulatory interventions is just to...

In this chapter, we address a number of foundational questions. What exactly are platforms? How do platforms relate to the various types of network effects? Importantly, do we need different tools to assess potential anticompetitive conduct that involves platforms?Specifically, we begin with a...

Across the world, regulators and policy makers are grappling with how to establish a competitive, safe and fair online environment that also safeguards users’ fundamental rights as citizens. Ahead of the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), this book “Digital markets and online...

Digital platforms are increasingly the subject of regulatory scrutiny. In comparison to multiple competitors, a single platform may increase consumer welfare if network effects are large or may decrease welfare due to higher prices or reduction in platform variety. We study the net effect of...

There is a discursive phenomenon permeating current debates on digital platform work. Even authors who strongly advocate classifying digital platform work as “employment” rarely support an application of employment law in the strict sense. For the most part, relevant policy debates have...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly and pervasively affecting society. AI and algorithms play a relevant role in the Intellectual Property (IP) discourse as well. Tomorrow, algorithms will of course come as creators and innovators but today they are already here as enforcers. Content...

When a user shares multi-dimensional data about themselves with a firm, the firm learns about the correlations of different dimensions of user data. We incorporate this type of learning into a model of a data market in which a firm acquires data from users with privacy concerns. User data is...

Consumer choices are increasingly mediated by algorithms, which use data on those past choices to infer consumer preferences and then curate future choice sets. Behavioral economics suggests one reason these algorithms so often fail: choices can systematically deviate from preferences. For...