Coders at the bar
Markets and the law as computer scientists see them, in their own words. 13 publications, from 2022 to 2025.
All 13 publications
Newest first2025
Understanding Digital Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
William Lehr, Volker Stocker and Jason Whalley
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.
Principal-Agent Dynamics and Digital (Platform) Economics in the Age of Agentic AI
Volker Stocker and William Lehr
This article applies the principal–agent framework to the use of autonomous AI systems in digital markets. It examines the challenge of aligning AI agents with the interests of end-users, given that many systems may also reflect…
Implementing the European AI Act: Balancing Horizontal Consistency with Sector-Specific Requirements
The European Union’s AI Act applies across a broad range of domains and use cases, aiming to promote horizontal consistency and prevent the sectoral fragmentation of AI governance.
The Growing Complexity of Digital Economies over the GenAI Waterfall: Challenges and Policy Implications
Volker Stocker and William Lehr
The GenAI genie is out of the bottle. AI, and its vanguard GenAI, is a change agent that profoundly impacts the global transition to a digital economy.
2024
Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects: The Role of Legal Experts in Legal NLP
The potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to transform the legal industry is increasingly undeniable. NLP can be used to reimagine legal search, improve legal reasoning and writing, answer legal questions, or extract…
AI Regulation and 6G: The Measurement Ecosystem Challenge
William Lehr and Volker Stocker
Artificial intelligence (AI) and its economic impacts have been emerging over decades. Even though the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 has caused a frenzy about generative AI that arguably prompted a surge in…
Discit ergo est: Training Data Provenance And Fair Use
Robert Mahari and Shayne Longpre
AI is the product of its training data. Public discussion of this subject frequently centers on massive corpora of text and images that have been scraped from the web, often without consent from the creators of these works.
2023
Competition Between AI Foundation Models
Thibault Schrepel and Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland
This short article serves as an introduction to Thibault Schrepel and Sandy Pentland’s latest working paper, “Competition between AI Foundation Models: Dynamics and Policy Recommendations” (open-access)…
Transparency by Design for Large Language Models
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Robert Mahari and Tobin South
Large Language Models – like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude – are akin to modern day oracles: they provide impressively useful outputs without revealing their reasoning.
Justice in a Vacuum?
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, Robert Mahari and Tobin South
From the Palaeolithic era until the mid-1800s, tally sticks represented an international system for recording debts. Debtors and creditors would break a piece of wood or bone in half, and the unique fracture memorialized the…
2022
Near-Decomposability as A Regenerative Process in Complex Social Phenomena
In complex systems, particularly when we study scalability, we address phenomena from “cells to societies”. The cell is an “ecology” of information (DNA) and chemical substances (also DNA) that self-organize in a biological…
Legal Dynamism
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland and Robert Mahari
Shortly after the start of the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wrote a now famous letter to James Madison. He argued that no society could make a perpetual constitution, or indeed a perpetual law, that binds future…
Economics and the Search for Life
Economics was informally named the “dismal science” in the 19 century, in order to denote the “dismal” predictions some economists of the era had about the future of humanity (e.g., population overgrowth).