Data and Competition: a Simple Framework with Applications to Mergers and Market Structure

Alexandre de Cornière, and Greg Taylor

No 14446, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: What role does data play in competition? This question has been at the center of a fierce debate around competition policy in the digital economy. We provide a simple framework for studying the competitive effects of data, encompassing a wide range of applications (product improvement, targeted advertising, price-discrimination) using a competition-in-utilities approach. We model data as a revenue-shifter, and identify conditions for data to be pro- or anti-competitive. The conditions are simple and often do not require knowledge of market demand or calculation of equilibrium. We use this framework to address policy-relevant questions related to market structure and data-driven mergers. We show that the effects of a data-driven merger between firms operating on adjacent markets depend both on whether data is pro- or anti-competitive and on firms' ability to trade data absent the merger.

Keywords: Competition; Big data; Data-driven mergers; Privacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L1 L4 L5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-com and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14446 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14446

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14446

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().