Symposium on Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario

In his book, Petit offers a “moligopoly” framework for understanding competition between large tech companies that may have significant market shares in their ‘home’ markets but nevertheless compete intensely in adjacent ones. Petit argues that tech giants coexist as both monopolies and oligopolies in markets defined by uncertainty and dynamism, and offers policy tools for dealing with the concerns people have about these markets that avoid crude “big is bad” assumptions and do not try to solve non-economic harms with the tools of antitrust. This symposium asks contributors to give their thoughts either on the book as a whole or on a selected chapter that relates to their own work. In it we hope to explore some of Petit’s arguments with different perspectives from our contributors.

Confirmed Participants

• Kelly Fayne, Antitrust Associate, Latham & Watkins
• Shane Greenstein, Professor of Business Administration; Co-chair of the HBS Digital Initiative, Harvard Business School
• Bowman Heiden, Co-director, Center for Intellectual Property (CIP)
• Peter Klein, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Chair of the Department of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Innovation, Baylor University
• William Kovacic, Global Competition Professor of Law and Policy; Director, Competition Law Center, George Washington University Law
• Kai-Uwe Kuhn, Academic Advisor, University of East Anglia
• Richard Langlois, Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut
• Doug Melamed, Professor of the Practice of Law, Stanford law School
• David Teece, Professor in Global Business, University of California’s Haas School of Business (Berkeley); Director, Center for Global Strategy; Governance and Faculty Director, Institute for Business Innovation
• Nicolas Petit, Joint Chair in Competition Law at the Department of Law and at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.

Series Posts (in order of posting)

• Symposium Introduction (Bowman)
• It’s All about What We Don’t Know (Melamed)
• Diversification Is At The Heart Of Competition (Langlois)
• The Fox and Shepherd Problem (Greenstein)
• It’s Not So Simple Who Owns “Your” Data (Klein)
• The Limits of Rivalry (Fayne)
• Big Tech but Bigger Ideas (Heiden)
• Antitrust Statutorification (Petit)