The UK Times Higher Edication magazine selected Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke’s new book, Virtual Competition, as book of the week.
Julia Powles writes:
“Unravelling the competition (or, to our American friends, antitrust) dimensions of the data-driven economy demands someone of the fearless but measured tenacity of Holmes or, indeed, Vestager. It requires penetrating a wall of rhetoric and myth, and a deep familiarity with competition policy’s objectives and limitations.
This is the task that two of the world’s leading competition law scholars, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, have set themselves in Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy. This highly readable and authoritative account sets out the ways that platforms have replaced the invisible hand with a digitised one – a hand that is human-engineered, subject to corporate control and manipulation, and prone to charges of unlawfulness, on three fronts in particular. First, collusion. Second, behavioural discrimination. And third, asymmetric ‘frenemy’ dynamics, such as that between Uber and the super-platforms Google and Apple, which distort competition through extraction and capture.”
She also favorably reviews Allen Grunes and Maurice Stucke’s “brilliantly executed” new book, Big Data and Competition Policy” (2016):
“Co-authored by Stucke, this time with the distinguished US anti-trust practitioner Allen Grunes, it contains a detailed analysis of merger and antitrust cases and lucidly explores the interplay between privacy and competition in a way that neatly sets up the analysis, and fills some of the gaps, in Virtual Competition.”
The review is available here.