EU Digital Sovereignty has emerged as a key policy topic amid growing geopolitical tensions fuelled by an AI arms race in which corporate investment and government support appear mutually reinforcing. This essay examines the meaning of digital sovereignty and the trade-offs associated with the EU’s ability to act as a first-class participant in the global...Read More
We develop a game-theoretic model to analyze optimal workplace arrangements in AI-enhanced teams where knowledge sharing is subject to location-dependent costs. Extending principal-agent theory to incorporate remote collaboration frictions, our model shows how return-to-office (RTO) policies affect incentives for employee effort and AI knowledge transfer. We identify conditions that ensure efficient in-person and remote work...Read More
Two decades of hyperactive EU digital rule-making have not delivered “digital sovereignty,” but instead exposed a strategic naïveté: Brussels built a Digital Single Market that turbocharged non-European cloud and platform incumbents. This article traces how data, consumer, platform, and AI regulation have extended EU law extraterritorially while leaving Europe structurally dependent on US (and, increasingly,...Read More
US antitrust law has traditionally paid little attention to global competitiveness and industrial policy objectives. This reflects a commitment to enabling the free play of competitive forces to determine market outcomes and an aversion to protectionist policies that may favor inefficient “national champions.” These assumptions are challenged in a global marketplace where China has pursued...Read More
The European Union’s recent wave of digital regulations, especially the Digital Services Act (DSA), highlights a strategic use of law as an instrument of industrial policy and global digital influence. While China has explicitly cultivated national technology champions through state-led industrial policy, the United States has largely relied on market-driven innovation and occasional strategic interventions...Read More
This paper argues that the unintended and unanticipated costs of globalization revealed during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have led to a renewed embrace of industrial policy. The rising market concentration and profit margins have also contributed to this development. And the challenges of regulating the digital economy through competition law...Read More
In product markets that rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI), firms both use data and generate data. For a multiproduct firm, the data generated by one product will often have spillover benefits on the firm’s other AI-enabled products, increasing their quality. This presumptively benefits consumers and may encourage procompetitive coordination between complementary products or data...Read More
“Great nations” rivalry includes all aspects of economic rivalry, so it is natural that the great nations consider antitrust a weapon in their arsenals, particularly in areas such as military, technology, culture, and finance. While some strategic use (and abuse) of antitrust is probably unavoidable, judicious deployment of competition law principles by great nations can...Read More
This special issue examines the coexistence of industrial and competition policy in a period of geopolitical rivalry and rapid technological change. The contributions analyze these tensions through three lenses: innovation economics, legal doctrine, and digital markets. Each paper offers a distinct perspective on how government intervention can both strengthen and weaken competitiveness. Together, the authors...Read More
Countries use non-tariff barriers (NTBs) as instruments of industrial policy. NTBs often are difficult to observe and hard to adjust because they are part of national regulations. NTBs are inflexible in comparison to tariffs. The number of NTBs has expanded significantly. The article concludes that NTBs can impede technological change and harm incentives to innovate.Read More
This article addresses three interrelated questions, namely: back to the basics, what are industrial policies? Granted that, is a new return of industrial policies actually in the making? And finally, what is there to be done? I argue that current “industrial policies” fall well short of any public intervention which (a) defines the boundaries between...Read More
This special issue examines the coexistence of industrial and competition policy in a period of geopolitical rivalry and rapid technological change. The contributions analyze these tensions through three lenses: innovation economics, legal doctrine, and digital markets. Each paper offers a distinct perspective on how government intervention can both strengthen and weaken competitiveness. Together, the authors...Read More
