2026 Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards Nomination

Every year, the competition law focused legal publisher Concurrences runs the Antitrust Writing Awards, which seek to highlight scholarship from across the discipline across a variety of categories. Spencer Cohen and I are delighted to have been nominated for the Best Student Paper this year!^[1] 🎉 Our paper, “Error Costs, Platform Regulation and Democracy”, was recently published in the Journal of Competition Law and Economics (open access). This short post briefly recaps the ideas in the paper.

The “New Platform Regulations”, like the EU’s Digital Markets Act or the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, are notable because they which enable proactive intervention against tech platforms before harm occurs. In doing so, they break with a long, ineffective tradition of competition law condemning abusive behaviour only after the fact, and represent a large shift in how competition regimes work. Our work analyses some implications of that shift.

We argue that proactive intervention has the ancillary benefit of protecting democracy in markets. After conceptualising the different ways in which democracy is understood in the literature, we find that laissez-faire approach to competition law actively undermines it. We then identify three ways in which the proactive approach of the new platform regulations, can help foster democracy.

1. Digital markets are always governed by somebody. The question is who. Tech giants are motivated by profit, and have the capability to boss around less powerful market participants and arbitrarily intervene in their affairs. Competition authorities, on the other hand, pursue publicly determined statutes and are subject to judicial review. The New Platform Regulations help the latter contest the decision-making of the former, and in doing so, facilitate democratically legitimate state intervention in markets where it would otherwise not take place under the laissez-faire approach.
2. The New Platform Regulations seek to “open up” markets and give people choice about which firms to transact with. The ability of consumers to choose from a ‘meaningful range of options’ is supposed to be a key source of legitimacy for markets; consumers can switch to a competitor if they are unhappy. Giving consumers choice lets them ‘vote with their feet, and lets them shape the direction of markets by ensuring that they are responsive to the demos.
3. We often have an idea in our heads that markets can “fail” and must be “fixed”. But this notion rests on a false assumption that there exists a “correct” market ordering to begin with. Markets are ‘open’ social systems, which rarely have an optimal end state. There are all sorts of competing and conflicting values that might feed into our concept of a well functioning market, and inescapable trade-offs between them. We argue the New Platform Regulations seek to actively ‘shape’ the direction in which digital markets evolve by putting forward a positive vision for how they should develop, as articulated by a clear set of rules laid out in law.