IN THE (LONDON) TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT, a very positive review of my colleague Maurice Stucke’s book (coauthored with Oxford’s Ariel Ezrachi), Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy. Excerpt:

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.

Read the whole thing!