Antitrust, Regulation, and User Union in the Era of Digital Platforms and Big Data / Lin William Cong, Simon Mayer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cong, Lin William.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Mayer, Simon.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30881.

NBER working paper series no. w30881

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.

Summary:

We model platform competition with endogenous data generation, collection, and sharing, thereby providing a unifying framework to evaluate data-related regulation and antitrust policies. Data are jointly produced from users' economic activities and platforms' investments in data infrastructure. Data improves service quality, causing a feedback loop that tends to concentrate market power. Dispersed users do not internalize the impact of their data contribution on (i) service quality for other users, (ii) market concentration, and (iii) platforms' incentives to invest in data infrastructure, causing inefficient over- or under-collection of data. Data sharing proposals, user privacy protections, platform commitments, and markets for data cannot fully address these inefficiencies. We introduce and analyze user union, which represents and coordinates users, as a potential option for antitrust and consumer protection in the digital era.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2023.