ASA is excited to announce that the ECOANTITRUST initiative led by ASA Program Director, Elena Rovenskaya, has been awarded the innovative Competition Policy and Power Research (CPPR) Fund to continue its exploration of systems analysis approaches for competition regulation of the digital economy.
The CPPR Fund was launched in 2024 by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) based in the Netherlands. The call was launched to support research that focuses on tackling the surplus market power of monopolies, including Big Tech companies, which have collectively amassed a majority market capitalization worldwide. The grants support projects which aim to bridge gaps in current knowledge and support practical advances and innovations in the use of competition and anti-trust tools.
Competition authorities have begun to comprehend the dynamic, interconnected, and highly complex nature of digital platform ecosystems, which are currently leveraging vast market power, resources, and knowledge capacities to exert monopolistic power into several economic sectors. The rapid consolidation of Big Tech in the generative artificial intelligence (AGI) space is the latest example of how technological incumbents are steering innovations and resources to favor them and stifling competition. A new regulatory toolkit is urgently needed by competition authorities in the fast-evolving digital era.
The proposed project, An Agile Algorithmic Tool for Taming the Complexity of Ecosystem Mergers (TOTEM), seeks to enhance the ability of competition regulators to deal with such complexities of the digital economy and its agents by informing new tools and approaches tailored for the digital economy grounded in complexity sciences. ASA was one of the 9 successful proposals out of the 113 total applications.
"The ECOANTITRUST team has been pioneering the detailed advancements of systems-led approaches for digital antitrust over the last three years. Receiving the CPPR grant validates the need for our research for competition authorities. Through TOTEM, we hope to promote the meaningful application of systems analyses in yet another important field of policy" noted Rovenskaya.
