Jacques Cremer (University of Toulouse I) & Jorge Padilla (Compass Lexecon): How to make competition policy fit for the digital age?

In 2019, many reports have been adopted or commissioned by antitrust authorities across the world to identify the new issues raised by the digital platforms and analyse how they could be dealt with by competition policy. What are your main takeaways from those reports? Do you see a consensus emerging among economists on the need to adapt competition policy? Jorge Padilla: Those reports suggest the existence of a broad consensus among economists and non-economists on a number of principles. First, contrary to what was argued for years, the emerging consensus is that competition policy has a role to play in winner-takes-all markets in order to ensure that dominant platforms are effectively disciplined by Schumpeterian innovation. Second, most practitioners believe that the costs of the