Chillin'Competition

Our friend, longtime colleague and founder of this blog, Professor Nicolas Petit, has coined a new word to describe tech giants rivalry: “moligopolism”. As he has explained to us, the lenght of this paper (76 pages) is a very good metric for the opportunity cost of running a daily blog… We’re happy to read that Nicolas is on top of his game. The paper conveys a very original approach to competition in the digital economy, and is well worth a read.

Here’s the link to his paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2856502. This is the abstract:

“This paper shows that the technology giants that antitrust agencies tend to characterize as entrenched monopolists can also be seen as firms engaged in a process of vibrant oligopolistic competition. Those firms – we refer to them as “moligopolists” – compete against the non-consumption in search of new and low-end market footholds. The failure of the antitrust structure to see that rivalry – its intensity may vary from one company to another – originates both in mainstream economics and applied competition theory. We believe those defects can be cured with a rechanneling of antitrust policy towards certain types of restraints, in certain types of market settings“.