Personal data brokers (PDBs) offer consumers financial rewards for their personal data that they have created at online content and service providers (CSPs) as a by-product of their usage. Policy makers view PDBs as a promising building block for empowering users in the digital economy and have...

We investigate the effects of alternative open access regimes on market performance. In particular, by means of an economic laboratory experiment we compare the market outcomes under unregulated wholesale competition, under a price-fixing rule (where firms must maintain their wholesale price for...

Zero rating and sponsored data have recently been introduced as new tari↵ options in mobile telecommunications markets. Both practices exempt data traffic of specific Internet services from an Internet user's download limit and thus allow for unlimited consumption of the respective content....

We conduct oligopoly competition experiments with differentiated goods in discrete and continuous time. Continuous time experiments allow for real-time, asynchronous strategic interaction and are therefore argued to be a more realistic mode of interaction, particularly in the context of...

Data donations promise to unlock the social benefits of personal data. Most recently, digital contact-tracing apps have been developed to collect individuals' donated contact and health data to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. As the effectiveness of contact-tracing apps hinges critically on...

Recent high-profile antitrust cases and policy proposals have put a spotlight on the relationship between firms’ access to big data and sustained competitive advantages in digital markets. In Europe, concerns about data-driven market power have led policy makers to propose far-reaching...

This article analyses the crucial role of user data for digital markets contestability and presents policy proposals devised to address growing concerns about the dominance of data-rich incumbents in digital markets. To this end, we discuss a data-driven theory of harm that would warrant ex-ante...