Digital Platforms and Antitrust

Regulating Information Platforms: The Convergence to Antitrust

Technological methods of transmitting information, i.e. information platforms, are thought to pose significant regulatory challenges. The markets in which telecommunications and other information services firms compete are associated with natural monopoly tendencies and powerful network effects that make some cooperation among competitors essential to consumer welfare. The importance of protect...

Antitrust, Consumer Protection, and the New Information Platforms

How Digital Economics Revises Antitrust Thinking.PDF

1 Antitrust thinking and enforcement have traditionally been firmly grounded in conventional economic models of monopoly and oligopoly market structures, all fully and inevitably constrained by the " laws " of demand and decreasing returns. The new economics of " digits, " encompassing those goods (like software, books, and music) that are capable of being reduced to 1's and 0's (meaning electr...

How Digital Platforms Increase Inequality

Winner-take-all careers are created through cumulative advantage. Once a player gains a small advantage over other equally skilled players, it snowballs over time. This phenomenon, coined the “Matthew effect” by sociologist Robert Merton, is part of the reason why the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Merton first described his findings while demonstrating that the more reputed scienti...

e-Services: Problems, Opportunities, and Digital Platforms

Services that are delivered over the Internet—e-services— pose unique problems yet offer unprecedented opportunities. In this paper, we classify e-services along the dimensions of their level of digitization and the nature of their target markets (business-to-business, business-toconsumer, consumer-to-consumer). Using the case of application services, we analyze how they differ from traditional...