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Digital platform marketplaces and ecosystems are new ways to organize economic activity among multiple players, which are critically changing the economics of products and services, and entire sectors. They are a new powerful force driving technology evolution, product and business model innovation, and the creation of new markets, all of which provide new ways for companies to generate and deliver value to final customers. As their centrality in the modern, digitally-enabled economy mounts, the firms controlling these digital platforms are also increasing their economic power and potential to control directly or indirectly the directions of innovation and terms of economic exchanges in digital markets. There are increasing concerns over the dominant role of platforms acting as market “gatekeepers”.
Particularly, under scrutiny is how value is distributed among the different actors, and the extent platform firms can entrench their position against actual and prospective competitors. Accordingly, new principles of “fairness” and “contestability” are gaining traction as a basis for a new regulatory competition framework for digital markets, with the EU’s recent Digital Markets Act (or DMA), which has implications far more reaching than the target BigTech companies, potentially affecting the functioning of current digital markets as well as emerging digital markets in more traditional sectors.
In this event, we will debate some of the more pressing and open issues with academic experts, as well as representatives of the antitrust authorities and BigTech companies. During the event, it will also be presented the focus and research program of newly born SDA Bocconi's research lab on the digital platform economy and regulation.
